A cogent, relevant look at the contemporary body in crisis.British
psychoanalyst Orbach (Sociology/London School of Economics; Susie
Orbach on Eating, 2002, etc.) has written extensively on women and
eating disorders since the 1978 publication of her classic Fat Is a
Feminist Issue. She finds the current obsession with the
perfectibility of the human body deeply troubling. We are assaulted
daily by promises to cure obesity, skin ailments, sexual distress
and signs of aging, she notes. "Body hatred is becoming one of the
West's hidden exports," as are such attempts to resolve it as
Korean girls undergoing the procedure to insert a Western eyelid.
Orbach advances two theories about the collective crises de corps.
There is no such thing as a "natural body," she argues, since each
of us is the product of a set of cultural and familial attachments
that we carry in our bodies, "shaped and misshaped by our earliest
encounters with parents and carers." Secondly, she believes this is
the last moment in history that we inhabit bodies "which are
familiar to us"; cellular, surgical, biological and pharmaceutical
enhancements promise (or threaten) to let us buy the perfect body
the way we buy flattering clothes. Orbach looks closely at several
extreme cases of body-mind distress, such as a man who could not be
happy unless his legs were amputated. Several essays emphasize the
importance of touch in infant and child development, contending
that youngsters instinctively pick up the bodily distress that
their parents carry. Orbach also chronicles the
"countertransferences" she assumed while treating physically uneasy
patients. "Body difficulties" are becoming more prevalent in the
consultation rooms of therapists like herself, she comments. The
demands we put on our bodies to perform and display produce
"volatility and instability." Beware, she warns, or our bodies will
bite back.The only flaw in Orbach's reasoned, wise essays is that
they're so low-key they may not get the attention they deserve.
(Kirkus Reviews)
In the past decades, the pressure to perfect and design our bodies
has been unprecedented. Breast enhancement is a sweet sixteen
birthday present in the suburbs of America, while eating problems -
from bulimia to obesity - are growing daily, affecting girls as
young as six. The body is no longer a given and to possess a
flawless one has become the ambition of millions. In China, women
are having their legs broken and extended by 5cms. In Iran, behind
the Hijab there are 35,000 cosmetic nose reconstructions a year. In
Brazil breasts and bottoms are reshaped along with the face so that
women there, as in China and Iran (and pretty much everywhere else
in reach of global media) can reflect western norms of beauty. In
her years of practice as a psychoanalyst, Susie Orbach has come to
realize that the way we view our bodies is the mirror of how we
view ourselves: our body becomes the measure of our worth. In this
book, she finally raises the fundamental questions about how we got
there.
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