body image

body image Towards the beginning of Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (first published in 1865), a scene takes place that illuminates the important role played by body image in the formation of our sense of ourselves. The episode, which occurs in a crowded junk shop, features an exchange between Mr Venus, a taxidermist, and Mr Wegg, recent amputee. Wegg has arrived at Venus's shop with the express purpose (now that he has the prospect of regular employment before him) of buying back his own severed leg, which Venus has purchased as part of a ‘miscellaneous’ lot from a local hospital. Wegg's account of why he wants to complete this transaction is both touching and surreal:
‘I have a prospect of getting on in life and elevating myself by my own independent exertions,’ says Wegg, feelingly, ‘and I shouldn't like I tell you openly I should not like — under such circumstances, to be what I call dispersed, a part of me here, and a part of me there, but should wish to collect myself like a genteel person.’As he makes clear, Wegg is worried that his body may be deficient or vulnerable to attack in its divided state: it is not, he fears, the body of a ‘genteel person’. What is at stake in this speech is Wegg's sense of his body: his imaging how his body is and how it appears to others. In fact Wegg has a complicated and multiple sense of how his body exists in the world. First, he knows what it is actually like; it's missing a limb, obviously. Secondly, he has the image of how it might appear to others; ugly, misshapen, perhaps. He is worried about this. Thirdly, he has a sense of how his body could look or perhaps how it should be. This anxious fantasy lies behind his otherwise ponderous sense of his potential gentility. If he can buy back his leg, he reasons, he can begin to restore his belief in his own body image.

The strange case of Wegg's lost leg makes clear what is implicit in all feelings about body image. Our sense of our own bodies emerges from a dialectic between our knowledge of it as a lived experience — its pleasures, its pains; the needs and desires of our physical selves — and a more ambiguous sense of how that body appears to others. In neither case is the knowledge we have, or feel we have, guaranteed to be true. Quite the contrary for most of us; we have no more sense of what we really look like than does Mr Wegg. We might feel we look right or suspect we look wrong; often this will depend on our mood at the time. Despite the potential for misapprehension inherent in our experience of our own body and its appearance, our ‘body image’, or sense of our physical selves, determines our interaction with the physical world and with other people. A confidence in our body image can reassure us at moments of crisis or indecision. This summary of body image accords with the common experiences of daily life. However, it is possible to codify these sensations, worries, and aspirations in a variety of ways; indeed, body image needs to be specified more closely if we are to appreciate its full significance. There are two ways in which body image has been defined: first, as a medical and psychological term for defining self-perception; second, as a social and cultural phenomenon, which enforces normative expectations. Both of these ideas are, in reality, interconnected — however, it makes sense in the present context to examine them separately.

From the perspective of a medical or psychological practitioner, the term ‘body image’ describes those perceptions of the self that are centred on the individual's sense of their own physical existence, both anatomical and physiological. Paul Schilder defined body image in the 1930s as: ‘The picture of our body which we form in our mind, that is to say the way in which our body appears to ourselves’. So defined, body image can be thought from a clinical standpoint to have two main states or modes — the normal and the traumatic. In the first case body image expresses our sense of our body's boundaries and capacities: principally our sense of our height, weight, and physical attractiveness as well as our expectation of the extent of our reach or the length of our stride. It is a normative idea that is held implicitly until we are shocked out of it by some event or remark.

This notion of our physical selves is of course evolving: progressing age, the process of puberty, and the changes of the menopause will cause an individual to update or revise the image of his or her body. However, accidents, surgery, disease, and diet can radically alter body image within a short time. This introduces the problem of a traumatic change in a person's body image. With this crisis in mind, modern nursing requires an understanding of how a patient's response to changes in their bodily reality will necessarily impact upon their recovery and sense of themselves. Someone who has undergone extensive surgery or who has suffered from a debilitating disease will often require care and support as they form a new image of their body, its shape and capacities. Without such assistance the process can be irreparably damaging to the patient's self esteem.

But why should our self esteem be so affected by our body image? In cultural terms this question can be answered by considering the forces and pressures that cause us to present our bodies — to ourselves and others — in a certain variety of ways. All societies have practices and codes that seek to regulate how the body is permitted to appear. Most often these are a combination of ideas of fitness, adornment, fashion, hygiene, size, and diet. These conceptions provide the basis for how a body is judged, defining the standards to which it is expected to conform. Failure to conform may be condemned, even considered obscene. Contemporary social ills such as anorexia and bulimia are connected, at least in part, with the pressure of these standards. The Western desire for slim figures, for bodies lithe and muscular, rather than rounded or corpulent, produces in some a destructive desire for excessive dieting, a form of self-denial which, they hope, will realign bodily reality with desired body image.

Women are perhaps particularly exposed to these pressures and are bombarded by more images that seek to privilege one ideal of female form over all others. However, it is not only women in Western cultures who are the recipients of demands upon how their bodies should appear. In other parts of the world, greater stress and more lavish praise is devoted to long necks, small feet, wide girths, and scarification than is generally consistent with European or North American ideals. Despite this apparent divergence, a similar desire to regulate and to judge, as well as to conform, dominates these conceptions of the body. Significantly, the cultural demands placed upon the body are subject to change and revision over time. Nonetheless these codes remain a huge influence on the individual's self esteem and sense of well-being. Our body image in fact is central, if ambiguously so, to our mental and physical well-being.

Robert Jones

Bibliography

Price, B. (1990). Body image: nursing concepts and care. Prentice Hall, New York.
Schilder, P. (1935). The image and appearance of the human body; studies in the constitutative energies of the psyche. Kegan Paul, London.

See also eating disorders; female form; phantom limb.