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Abstract
Physical appearances are undertheorized in psychoanalysis. This paper discusses the multifaceted significance of appearances and the use of normative unconscious processes to think about appearances. The paper examines, moreover, how these dynamics intersect and interact with, inter alia, race, class, gender, and sexuality, and implicate politics, personal and otherwise. As psychoanalysis takes a Second Relational Turn, clinicians should consider the effects of appearances and acknowledge their impact, just as they acknowledge and explore the effects of factors such as race, class, sex, and gender; if clinicians do not explore patients’ appearances, they risk not recognizing them fully. The paper further discusses the connection between the psychic and the social in a clinical case, considering how a patient’s appearance informs her internal and external relational patterns, including how her “beauty” contributes to failures of recognition; affects her position within and among social hierarchies; and influences the transference and countertransference matrix of the therapeutic dyad.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 I have set off with quotation marks, upon first usage, words and phrases that can have shifting, culturally defined, and sometimes problematic meanings, such as “femininity” and “beauty.”
2 Legal scholar Deborah Rhode contended that discrimination based on appearance is a “significant form of injustice … that the law should remedy” (2009, p. 1035). Hamermesh has spent decades studying the economic impact of appearances in myriad professions. Like Rhode, Hamermesh has explored legal remedies (2014). Other researchers, including Etcoff, have argued that “societal action aimed at lowering appearance discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere … would help increase subjective well-being for many” (Gupta et al., Citation2016, p. 1322). I note the framing of this issue as one of social and economic justice requiring public policy remedies to emphasize the need for further recognition within psychoanalysis.
3 Alison Winch has coined the term “gynaepticon” to describe peer-driven surveillance and policing of female bodies by women. In this variation on Michel Foucault’s panopticon, “the many women watch the many women” (Winch, Citation2015).
4 As Ken Frank and Kim Bernstein have observed, “that which seems hardest for us to bring up is precisely that which most needs to be introduced into the clinical conversation, despite our doubts and discomfort, since it nevertheless operates wordlessly in the room” (Frank & Bernstein, Citation2012).
5 “That [we] now challenge limitations of class, race and … male and female is welcomed. [L]ess welcome is that globalism, which … exposes the deep inequities of race and class … offers a story of belonging if one … erase[s] a[] … poverty of background by expunging its physical markers and securing the right look [and] … body” (Orbach, Citation2009, p. 323-324)
6 In her article, “The otherness of fat,” Offman presents an incisive and heartfelt examination of the impact on the treatment of the changing body weights of each member of a therapeutic dyad (2020).
7 Instrumental reasoning focuses on “effective means to an end and not … on improving living conditions, promoting reasonable agreement, or human understanding” (Maura, Citation2013).
8 I have changed biographic details to protect O’s identity and have received her consent to write about our work.
9 I am herein telling but a few parts of a complex clinical story and relationship through a purposefully narrow lens that is focused on appearances and gender within a specific cultural milieu.
10 As Layton has emphasized, “[o]ne way … clinicians can contest the psychic structure on which patriarchal capitalism depends is to work to deconstruct such culturally enforced dichotomies” (2004b, p. 34).
11 “If gender and sexuality are softly assembled, if the components that enter into the experience of being a gender are variable within a life and certainly across lives, if there are multiple pathways and unique constructions of meaning—it seems likely that we will be much closer to clinical experience than with developmental theories that stress particular narratives, linearity, and distinct developmental lines” (Harris, Citation2000, p. 150).
12 Harris explains: “Any of these experiences which a tomboy claims for her tomboyhood could be, in another person, happily or unhappily ungendered or ego-syntonically feminine. Terms like “masculinity” and “femininity” are very context sensitive, taking on a distinct coloration and particular networks of meaning within particular life-worlds. One sets the terms in quotation marks to signal both the irony and the qualifications attached” (Harris, Citation2000, p. 230).
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Lisa L. Ruesch
Lisa L. Ruesch, JD, LCSW, is a 2021 graduate of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP)’s Adult Training Program in Psychoanalysis and Comprehensive Psychotherapy, a recipient of NIP’s Educator’s Award, a Co-Director of NIP’s Curriculum Committee, and an instructor at NIP. Before entering the field, she practiced complex commercial litigation and family law. She works with adults, children, and families in her private practice in New York City.