Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Gaze, Body Image, Shame, Judgment and Maternal Function

Being and Belonging

Lía A. Roth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367462765
• eBook ISBN: 9781000045239
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health

Have you ever been praised or criticized about your body or any part of it? With this question, participants of a research study were invited to share their experiences of body judgment. As participants described, the body is a carrier of messages and the source of judgmental experiences.

Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Gaze, Body Image, Shame, Judgment and Maternal Function: Being and Belonging offers an insightful and engaging psychoanalytical account of experiences of shame and fear of rejection, explained through clinical vignettes and research participants' scripts. Exploring the findings from the individual and social standpoints, as well as the cultural and historical influences, Dr. Roth proposes that judgements are experienced as attacks, with the meaning attributed to the criticized body part, affecting the sense of self and forming a central point of the participants' identity trauma. Furthermore, that as guilt requires reparative action, shame requires an act of sacrifice to align the individual to the ideal and to preserve the matrix of belonging, thus explaining the participants' use of alienation as a defense.

This book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, as well as scholars of culture and religion. Giving a brief introduction to psychoanalytic concepts, with a full glossary, it will also appeal to the non-psychoanalytic reader, interested in body image and how related perceptions and judgements can affect our own sense of Being and Belonging.

1
Made out of crystal

“It’s like I’m made out of crystal. People can look through me; and they all despise me,” Mr. Whyte said. Mr. Whyte could not look me in the eyes. He kept holding his hat, as he wrinkled it between his hands while staring down to the floor. He was more than 40 years old when he started coming to sessions. Although tall, his somber walk with a bowed back made him appear rather small. His entire posture expressed the deep shame he was constantly feeling. He was terrorized by the belief that people tend to look at him, talking ill of him behind his back.

For years Mr. Whyte has been trying to avoid looking at his coworkers with the magical expectation that they, in turn, would not be able to see him. In the same manner, he isolated himself by using headphones. He believed his headphones stifled people’s voices. My understanding was different. Those headphones were a counter-phobic object that mediated his relationship with the environment. The voices criticizing him were likely a projection of his own insufferable aggression he could not contain within. The headphones helped by stopping that projection.

He genuinely felt others could read his mind and had nothing good to say about him. It took him a while to understand it was his own aggression projected onto others that haunted him. Although the level of suffering may differ, Mr. Whyte’s account is prototypical of many others. He wishes to belong, but his belief of self-inadequacy and weakness stops him short. He appears as symptomatic of an early fixation in the mirror stage of early development I will be exploring in this book.

This book is based on a qualitative research project I performed as part of my doctoral degree. I have also added vignettes from my clinical work and personal affairs. I believe the body is the vantage point of our existence, and the experience of belonging to a body is our sense of self. The body gives continuing support to our sense of self, starting every morning when we decide how to show ourselves to the world ‒ our hair style, the way we dress, use make-up, inscribe tattoos, as much as the way we walk and make gestures. The rhythms we have are all an expression of how comfortable (or not) we feel with our bodies and the effect we want to make on others. One of the participants, Mrs. Byer, won a contest for the most beautiful eyes when she was five years old. She has been making her eyes up ever since. As a septuagenarian Jewish woman, she continues to find her beautiful blue eyes are a protective shield against criticism and discrimination.

Our body gives shape to our sense of self. Consequently, it also weighs in on the way we relate with one another. In Gogol’s (1836/2014) The Nose, the Collegiate Assessor Kovalev wakes up one morning to realize his nose is gone. He eventually sees someone of much higher ranking than his getting into a fancy carriage. He realizes this decorated civil servant is his nose. Kovalev covers his face with a handkerchief after having lost the phallic symbol of his virtue. He feels dethroned by his own nose doing so much better than him.

Rostand’s (1897/2009) Cyrano de Bergerac, that chivalrous, sharp musketeer that was as quick with his sword as he was with his mouth. Cyrano’s nose was his scepter and orb…

My nose is huge, enormous, vast!

Listen, poor snub-nose, flathead,

Empty headed meddler, know

That I am proud possessing such appendice,

‘This well known, a big nose is indicative

Of a soul affable, and kind, and courteous,

Liberal, brave, just like myself, and such

As you can never dare to dream yourself,

Because your foolish features are as bare

Of pride, of passion, and of purity.

(Rostand, Act 1, scene IV)

A nose can symbolize someone’s best qualities, like in Bergerac’s virtue, loyalty and bravery. It can also symbolize the biggest weakness and insecurities. Mr. Horowitz, one of the participants, felt his nose was so big people would not want to spend time with him. As with Cyrano de Bergerac, Mr. Horowitz did not feel a girl would be interested in him. In a Gogolian way, Mr. Horowitz’s nose had a life of his own. He felt people were paying attention at his nose but could not see him as a person.

Mr. Horowitz is a successful businessman. He described himself as someone who used to be known for his nose. Currently, he would better describe himself as a “short, fat, bald guy.” The nose “dominated my features for 20 years until it got fixed,” shared Mr. Horowitz. He depicted his childhood nose as “Roman gothic, with a hook or a Jewish nose.” He repeatedly broke his nose. Then, when he was around age 20, a doctor suggested surgery to allow proper breathing. Upon surgery, his nose reincarnated into “straight, normal. Perfect.”

The nose is that protruding part at the center of the human face and takes about a third of its space. One can use it for guidance by following one’s own nose, keep the nose clean, or win by a nose. One can turn their nose up at someone or be under someone’s nose, stick their nose into something, or rub someone else’s nose into something. For Bower (as cited in McNeil, 1998) the nose is always visible to assist in positioning objects or sensing whether it is they or we that are moving.

Noses provide human beings with the sense of smell, which is one of the earliest methods of perception. Infants can detect their mother’s by scent soon after birth and adults identify their children or spouses by their aroma (Alperovitz, 2013). In an 1897 letter to William Fliess, Freud suggested “he turns up his nose = he regards himself as something particularly noble” (Masson, 1985, p. 279). Within East Asia, a big nose can be a sign of good fortune, or it has the negative connotation of showing the person is a foreigner. Pinocchio’s nose would grow when he lied and was deceitful. His nose shows a negative attribute attached to big noses. In India’s “earliest times, perhaps as far back as 3000 B.C., amputation of the nose was a traditional punishment for sexual misdemeanors” (Santoni-Rugiu & Sykes, 2007, p. 170).

Mr. Horowitz started the interview with laughter and asked for a repeat of the research probe. He needed time to master the interview situation. His laugh suggested feelings of inadequacy and hesitation about bringing memories of the past. “When I was a… When I was a kid, my nose got broke quite often for various reasons and I had a Roman gothic nose,” he remembered. That Roman gothic nose was most painful for Mr. Horowitz. He shared this information on the second part of his statement. His emotional tone and memory brought up indicated the delicacy that was required from me to approach this topic:

So, you get called names for it. Um…. It changes the way you’d look at yourself. It was enough where I didn’t go… go dating anybody through high school. Didn’t really think I should, ‘cause I had this big nose. Got called everything from a Jewish nose, to a hooked nose, to a big nose. So you just use it as a joke instead of as a negative. So you’d make fun of your own… of my own, um… what I call… thought was a big nose.

When Cyrano de Bergerac falls in love with Roxane, his nose becomes the center of his doubts, as in the case of Mr. Horowitz. Their doubt is suggestive of an association between big noses and sexuality:

This lengthy nose that goes wherever I will,

Pokes yet a quarter mile ahead of me;

Prevents me from being loved

By even the poorest and most graceless of ladies.

(Rostand, Act 1, scene V)

Mr. Horowitz’s nose appears as a dominating feature. “So I took it away from the conversation. Since you go like old Jimmy Durante would say: ‘That’s no banana, that’s my nose.’ So if you came up with something funny or stupid, people would not be able to comment about it, since I did it first.”

His use of humor as a defense mechanism implied the demands of his superego as representative of cultural values. His nose was not “normal.” It was “disgusting,” as Mr. Horowitz described it. It made him defective, unwanted. He felt identified with the socio-cultural qualities denoted by his big nose. Those qualities regulated his standing in the world and his social relations. If his nose was disgusting, he as person could not be any better. Mr. Horowitz avoided dating as a way of steering clear from repudiation.

Having broken his nose 25 times, a doctor suggested surgery: “I did not know it was important to me, but I probably wouldn’t be where I’m at today. If it was still hooked, I might have stayed home and worked in a grocery store. I might have still been in (a small town). I probably would have been in out of the hole…. Probably I would have never dated girls.”

Mr. Horowitz was in his early sixties at the time of the interview. The remainder of the participants of this research were individuals between 39 and 81 years old, all college-educated or above. The research started in April of 2016 with the prompt: “Have you ever been praised or criticized about your body or any part of it?” Our body and appearance have an impact on how we appraise ourselves and how we relate to our surroundings. How we feel about our body is influenced by the real or imagined judgments we receive throughout our lives, especially at times when we are particularly sensitive. It also has to do with the concepts of gaze, organic insufficiency, body image, and ultimately of our sense of being and belonging.

Participants talked about the size of their breast, height, old-looking hands, big noses, blue eyes, skin, clubfoot limp, gap between the front teeth, and their body shape. Everyone had a story to share. Their stories were an expression of a deep secret and secluded lifelong endurance. My research director, Dr. Stephen Soldz, and I were surprised to learn how profound and widespread this type of suffering is. Indeed, at one point or another in our lives, we’ve all been criticized about our body or a part of it. In addition, participants evinced having a particular body part prone to judgmental messages of a certain kind. Whether these messages are real or imagined makes no difference. Occasionally, judge and jury falls on the same person. As Mrs. Hughes acknowledged: “Sometimes we can be our worst enemies.” In different instances, it can be someone else being critical. But the message – the judgment – must be timely and of significant value for impact.

For instance, since her twenties, Mrs. Teak has been convinced of having old-looking hands. She was a retired teacher at the time of the interview. As with a variety of professions, hers involved exposing her body in front of an audience. Mrs. Teak invested much of her time in the care of her hands. It was a way of dealing with her belief and doubts about the message and its meaning. For instance, she said, adults “are more critical of the way you look.” Her friends would not be as honest because “they wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings.” Whereas “kids are brutally honest.”

Well, I’ve… Ah, I would say I’ve been criticized with my hands. I’m very, um… And it’s been for a long time cause now that I am getting older…. But I still have very old hands for my age…. Um… When I was a teacher, sometimes kids would comment, as I would write on the board, things like that. So… Um… I try to use… I think it… I think I… I became more self-conscious of it…. I’ve always kinda hurt my feelings and everything.

We start our lives by touching. Gradually, we learn there are things that can be touched and other ones that are untouchable. In India, Japan, and sundry parts of the world, the “untouchables” comprise the lowest social class. They attend occupations that make them unclean, impure, and outcasted (e.g., death-related jobs, cleaning of excrements, etc.).

Touch can happen skin to skin or it does not happen at all, as in the untouchables. In America, some withstand ostracism when they have done something considered out of mainstream. It is clearly observed when someone’s nerve is touched while discussing politics. It happens when an employee loses face while walking away from their job with their box of personal belongings, never to return after being laid off. Being fired is more than just terminating an occupation. Losing the job means losing part of our identity, our social status, the associations established through employment. Many unemployed individuals find it difficult to resocialize past termination. They feel like they have lost their persona as a successful administrator, engineer, whatever. They do not know how to present themselves. Like one’s name needs an occupation attached to it. Touch – and the untouchable – can be physical or symbolic.

Dr. Dillon was 50 years old when we met for the interview. He was tall, trim, and recently started to let his hair grow. There was an almost undetectable limp to his walk. His explanation for this was that one of his legs was shorter than the other one as well as the fact that he also had a clubfoot. But that was not the body part that concerned him:

I was with neighbor kids, cycling in the streets in Switzerland. And… Uh! It was a hot summer day so I took off my shirt and… and one of the kids turned around and said: “I would be ashamed if I had a fat belly like this one.” And I was shocked! Truly shocked, I was not even aware that I had a belly.

Dr. Dillon, at the time a 14-year-old teenager, encountered an “athletic second-grade boy” that he barely knew. Receiving the message was like crashing against the western values embodied in the voice of a young boy that called him fat. Then Dr. Dillon said, “I think the kid was acting out something he heard and I think it has to do with the culture that you have to look fit.” He felt he had no defense mechanism in place to respond. He had no way to say “Oh yeah! That’s complete nonsense,” as he did during the interview with me. Because the child spoke as he was turning his head to another youngster, it is also unclear whether the message was really directed at Dr. Dillon. Such a judgment “left a major impact on me…. I even remember that after almost 50 years…. I think that’s sitting somewhere in the background of my head even if I’m consciously not aware of it.”

The judgments that so deeply affected all participants, bringing feelings of shame, mostly emerged during puberty and adolescent years. For those that heard the judgment in later years, the problematic body part also surfaced in much later (e.g., psoriasis, wrinkles on neck, and dry skin). Their experience had an impressively deep and long-lasting repercussion. They all have been dealing with the sequelae ever since. Dr. Dillon admitted, “I even remembered it after almost 50 years…. It left a major impact on me.” Dr. Kamala asserted, “The story is embedded over there and I, whenever I think of it, it’s like a pinprick.” Except for one, all stories were about negative judgments.

Where do we start?

In On Narcissism, Freud (1914/1953) refers to the infant as “His Majesty, the Baby,” to express various issues. In the womb, a baby has warmth and security. All its needs are met and sustained in an oceanic¹ feeling of comfort. In this magic cosmic world, the unborn is at the center of their universe. It is crucial for the infant to continue to have a sense of fantasized omnipotence with the assistance of their first caregivers, as well as through an innate stimulus barrier that keeps them protected from the stimuli of the outside world.

Humans are born immature. All the perceptual senses (touch, sight, hearing, smell, taste) and social and cognitive skills need developing. Sight and gaze are not the same. Sartre (1943/1984) emphasizes how anything can bring the effect of a gaze. Gaze is preverbal, is drive ridden and related to partial objects whereas sight is developmentally later, related to our capacity to see and to somehow make sense or question what we are looking at following the reality principle – activity that is culturally affluent.

The establishment of perceptual neurosynapses starts at birth and develops gradually through different lines (Freud, 1965/2018) or networks (Biven, 1980), with successively increasing differentiation and in which “prior developmental structures are incorporated into later ones by hierarchic integration” (Inderbitzin & Levy, 2000, p. 218) in interaction with the environment.² These pathways, be it lines or networks, are susceptible to tensions of integration and fragmentation. Furthermore, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Made out of crystal
• 2 The body image
• 3 We are all Zeligs
• 4 Branded by shame, taste values
• 5 Cracked mirror, branded by shame
• 6 Does it happen everywhere the same?
• 7 Being and belonging
• 8 Shame, body image, maternal function, and judgment
• Glossary
• References
• Index