ABSTRACT
The concept of the handicapped smile was developed by Valerie through her work as a psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic Workshop on Mental Handicap and is elaborated clinically and theoretically in her groundbreaking work, Mental Handicap and the Human Condition. Valerie's theory of the handicapped smile and its role as a defence against the knowledge of trauma – significantly, not only in the patient, but also in the therapist – has proven to be immensely important, not only for work in the field of intellectual disability, but also in mainstream psychotherapy. Perhaps a smiling, cultural handicapping is enacted collusively and operates most effectively in those areas of society where there is a complicit refusal to remember. Valerie's concept of the handicapped smile was vital in being able to hear the menace. The handicapped smile can be seen to operate as a defence in a far wider context than that of disability.
