Weiye Loh's Library tagged Psychoanalysis → View Popular, Search in Google

Feb

2012

Rationally Speaking: Tear Down The Wall: Psychoanalysts Suppress Documentary on Autism

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Censorship Psychoanalysis Libel Law Freedom of Expression

Aug

2011

A 'Philosophy' of Plastic Surgery in Brazil - NYTimes.com

In 1988 a newly democratic Brazil ratified an ambitious constitutional right to health care. Public hospitals, though, are poorly funded and often beset by long lines, crumbling infrastructure and rude service. (My middle class Brazilian friends, who pay enviably low premiums for private health insurance, generally would not set foot in one.) A right to beauty thus seems to value a rather frivolous concern in a country with more pressing problems — from tropical diseases, like dengue, to the diseases of civilization, like diabetes. Yet to an outsider trying to understand a new society, such a view had a whiff of condescension. I remembered the remark of a Carnival designer: “Only intellectuals like misery, the poor want luxury.” I wanted to try to understand what this medical practice meant to the people who practiced it and claimed they benefited from it.

After a long wait, I began new fieldwork among a “tribe” of Cariocas (residents of Rio) less familiar to me: socialites and their maids, divorced housewives, unemployed secretaries, aspiring celebrities, transvestite prostitutes and other patients who were making Brazil, as a national news magazine bragged, the “empire of the scalpel.”

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Beauty Plastic Surgery Philosophy Psychoanalysis

Patients though often say (after their wounds have healed) they are happy with results. Yet repeat surgeries are common: either to correct botched operations or in pursuit of more “health.” We might ask: if you’re psychologically suffering, why not have psychological treatment? One doctor had this response: “What is the difference between a plastic surgeon and a psychoanalyst? The psychoanalyst knows everything but changes nothing. The plastic surgeon knows nothing but changes everything.”
While the “talking cure” treated bodily complaints via the mind, plastic surgery healed mental suffering via the body.
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- In Brazil, as in Argentina, psychoanalysis enjoyed extraordinary popularity among wealthier Brazilians. But many veterans of Freudian or Lacananian therapy have supplemented or supplanted it with plástica. For the patients at public hospitals, psychoanalysis had never been “an option,” a psychologist who worked in Pitanguy’s clinic told me. Echoing the words of the mischievous Carnival designer, she explained, “The poor prefer surgery.”
- The “beauty doctor” was a term of derision. But as techniques improved they were used for cosmetic improvements. Missing, however, was a valid diagnosis. Concepts like psychoanalyst Alfred Adler’s inferiority complex — and later low self-esteem — provided a missing link.
- the notion that at least some defects cause unfair suffering and social stigma is now widely accepted.
- Pitanguy, whose patients often have mixed African, indigenous and European ancestry, stresses that aesthetic ideals vary by epoch and ethnicity.
- What matters are not objective notions of beauty, but how the patient feels. As his colleague says, the job of the plastic surgeon is to simply “follow desires.”
- Plastic surgery may contribute to a biologized view of sex where pleasure and fantasy matter less than the anatomical “truth” of the bare body.
- When a good life is defined through the ability to buy goods then rights may be reinterpreted to mean not equality before the law, but equality in the market.
- Pierre Bourdieu argued that nearly all aspects of taste reflect social class. He extends his argument to the body itself: posture, gesture, even habits of chewing food. Curiously, and almost in passing, he makes an exception for physical attractiveness. Bodies “should,” he writes, “be perceived as strictly corresponding to their “owners’” position in the social hierarchy.” And yet they don’t. “The high and mighty,” he argued, “are often denied the “bodily attributes of their position, such as height or beauty.” In other words, attractiveness is a quality that is at least partially independent of other social hierarchies. For example, the rich and well-born are not always good looking.
- Beauty is unfair: the attractive enjoy privileges and powers gained without merit. As such it can offend egalitarian values. Yet while attractiveness is a quality “awarded” to those who don’t morally deserve it, it can also grant power to those excluded from other systems of privilege. It is a kind of “double negative”: a form of power that is unfairly distributed but which can disturb other unfair hierarchies. For this reason it may have democratic appeal. In poor urban areas beauty often has a similar importance for girls as soccer (or basketball) does for boys: it promises an almost magical attainment of recognition, wealth or power.
- In Brazil’s favelas many dreams for social mobility center on the body. N.G.O.’s offer free lessons in fashion modeling. Marriage is often seen as an out-of-reach luxury; seduction a means of escaping poverty. Powerful attractions that cross class lines are a favorite theme in telenovelas. And working class women face long lines at public hospitals to have cosmetic surgery. These social facts stem from the lack of other opportunities for many women. Yet, they also reflect an accurate, not deluded, perception of the role of physical attractiveness in consumer capitalism.

Jun

2011

Carl Jung, part 2: A troubled relationship with Freud – and the Nazis | Mark Vernon | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Jung's relationship with Freud was ambivalent from the start. First contact was made in 1906, when Jung wrote about his word association tests, realising that they provided evidence for Freud's theory of repression. Freud immediately and enthusiastically wrote back. But Jung hesitated. It took him several months to write again.

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Psychoanalysis

Jung considered Freud too reductionist. He could not accept that the main drive in human life is sexual. Instead, he defined libido more broadly as psychic energy or life force, of which sexuality is just one manifestation. As to the Oedipus complex, Jung came to believe that the tie between a child and its mother was not based upon latent incestuous passion, but stemmed from the fact that the mother was the primary provider of love and care. Jung had anticipated the attachment theory of John Bowlby, which has subsequently been widely confirmed
Jung also believed that the contents of the unconscious are not restricted to repressed material. Rather, the unconscious resources an individual's life. A human person is built up of layers. The conscious aspect is the psychosomatic whole that comprises the body and cognisant mental life. Beneath that lies a personal unconscious, a supply of material from the life of the individual. And beneath that lies a collective unconscious that is inherited. Jung believed he had objective evidence for this common heritage from his studies of schizophrenics, who apparently spoke of images and symbols they could not have discovered in their reading, say, or culturally.
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- Jung anticipates post-Freudian theories, this time about the nature of the unconscious. In his recent book, The Social Animal, David Brooks observes that 21st century sciences are showing how the unconscious parts of the mind "are not dark caverns of repressed sexual urges." Jung wrote precisely that 100 years ago, and neuroscientists, psychologists and economists of today might find parts of Jung a highly suggestive read.

Carl Jung, part 1: Taking inner life seriously | Mark Vernon | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

If you have ever thought of yourself as an introvert or extrovert; if you've ever deployed the notions of the archetypal or collective unconscious; if you've ever loved or loathed the new age; if you have ever done a Myers-Briggs personality or spirituality test; if you've ever been in counselling and sat opposite your therapist rather than lain on the couch – in all these cases, there's one man you can thank: Carl Gustav Jung.

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Psychoanalysis

the ego and the self. Achieving the right balance between the two aspects of the psyche is central to his theory of personality development, called individuation.
People are not simply mad, he concluded. Rather, there is a method in their madness. In one case, Jung showed that a patient who for 50 years had been fixated on the apparently meaningless task of making illusory shoes, had been abandoned by a lover who was a cobbler.