ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a case study of Giorgio. He is a man in his mid-thirties and he suffers from Down’s syndrome. The chapter also presents the case study of Ombretta, who is one of the best-known users of the institution she attends. Socio-sanitary institutions can be defined according to two essential paradigms. The first concerns space. The second paradigm is that of time. Handicap induces the “normal” person to cope with an undeniable, insurmountable limit. Mental or psychic handicap draws attention to the malfunctioning of such intrasubjective dialectics. The notion of debility sanctioned the very degree of that disparity, suggesting the idea of the subject’s intrinsic weakness, by implication naturalising it, as if it were the mental equivalent of the debility that medicine had found on the physical level. In serious handicap, intelligence is the active residue of the clear severance that deficiency imposes on intuition and elaboration, reception and process.
