Commentary 1 - Body Image - Self Image
"The term body image has been used to describe all the ways that an individual conceptualizes and experiences his or her body, whether consciously or not. This includes his collective attitudes, feelings and fantasies about his body, as well as the manner in which a person has learnt to organize and integrate his body experiences."
This subject has always fascinated me, how people perceive themselves, their body and self image in relation with their own feelings and related to others, how far they can go on trying to change their shape, the way they are, the way they dress, they talk; they behave just to satisfy external values and expectations from society, friends, relatives, partners, trends, fashion, etc. How far can we go from ourselves, from our own needings in order to satisfy others or to be accepted and loved by them?
May be this question and its answer just reinforce the concept that body image have to be defined as a product of social interaction and communication. Image in itself has as main characteristic, which is the communication of a message, of content or meaning, different images in different contexts have different meanings. The translation or perception of an image depends on the pre accepted codes between sender of the message and the receiver. When one does not know the codes of the other, there is no communication. We assume here that communication is the basic requirement for living in a group and once we cannot communicate we tend to isolate ourselves. Would be this western cult to individualization just a result of our fear of confrontation with different codes of communication? At one hand we have the need of attention, of being loved, of interacting and integrating and at the other hand we want to be left alone, believing that we have the power of controlling life and that society should change to fulfil our expectations.
It seems that sometimes people can go really far in this kind of schizophrenia. At one side the "Me" we know, the one we really are, and at the other side, the other "mes" that we create and use to "be part" of something. The point here is that after some time of using these masks we start to lose contact with our real being, we forget who we really are and start to be those masks, to act as robots, pre-programmed; a dangerous process for the individual development, a safe process to the ones who wants to control, the ones who want to sell their products .
Would be this western approaching of the individual as two separate entities, body and mind, the principle and cause behind our social and individual schizophrenia? For example, the preoccupation with cultivating a slim body amongst female adolescents stems from an assumption that mind and body are separate entities. The mind here is seen as responsible for controlling the body, we learn to separate mind from body, and think of the body as outside our selves though at the same time personal. As a result of this contradiction, an individual may struggle with the relationship between his or her body and mind (the mind striving to obtain an ideal and the body contradicting this). Hunger, or desires of the body, becomes something that may be fought by the self ("restricting the appetite becomes an exercise in self-control"), the body and self become not only separated but also adversaries to each other, with the self separated from the physical and responsible for achieving autonomy through control over the physical body.
The human kind is the mind
The human body is the earth
The mind tries to control the body
The man tries to control nature
If mind becomes an adversary to the body
Man becomes an adversary of the earth
Man thinks he can win, but he cannot!!
During their entire life individuals are bombed with messages like, "be gentle, be nice, be good, be thin, be beautiful, be this, and be that, and if you are not, we don't love you, we don't accept you". All this kind of messages, they work mostly at the subconscious levels, they are hidden in our words, in our behaviour, hidden rules of a social game. It is almost like a secret password that we need to know to "log in" in a certain group or situation.
Sometimes this situation can go to an extreme and we even start to hate who we are just because that is not what the others expect from us, a psychological autoimmune disorder, the self starts to attack itself. Would be this the reason for so many kinds of psychological diseases?
At a certain point we start to believe that the rules we accepted as truth, in order to communicate and to survive in our communities are absolute rules, and than we start to reject the rules and codes from other groups as would exist no cross cultural reality, no relativity in the universe. A part of our body and group image is the way we perceive God. This is a group accepted rule, and if your group has a different rule, i. e., a different God, than you are my enemy, and there is no communication possible only war. This kind of conflict goes from the individual until the group and community level (I/we are the right and you are the wrong).
Another point that I also like to reflect about is the "able X disabled body". How difficult it must be to live within a disable body and to build up a healthy body image. Different cultures approach the problem in different ways. Whereas in some cultures this can be seen as an advantage, in other can be a total disadvantage. Society has been trying to deal with this problem for centuries and it looks like it is getting better. There is more respect for the disabled individual. There are a lot of people working to make the life our disabled brothers and sisters a little bit more pleasant and worthy. Even thou, I believe that it is not easy to live under these circumstances, seen how it is to be "normal" and have to accept the reality of a disabled body. How these factors affect the body image, once we use it to communicate with others through it? The fear of rejection, the feeling of impotence of not being able to change the situation, the comparison with other body images.
I hope that we "westerns" can learn how to unify body and mind and heal our schizophrenia; that we can be more than the sum of our parts and walk towards a holistic approach of life, that we stop to be our greatest enemy. Than, maybe there will be some chance of surviving for our society.
Posted by quanticmove
at 5:01 PM MEST
