PSYCHOANALYSIS DECONSTRUCTS fictions, falsehoods and all sorts of fakery. Bland familiar stories become more interesting through the intelligent act of sensitive listening and paying attention. If something is growing, the psychoanalyst in the corner of the room is curious to see what might be shrinking. We are forever interested in narrative twists and turns, opacities, inconsistencies, slips in the traditions of conduct, innuendos and occasional burps, otherwise outcast by either stereotypes or empirical traditions. To crack a Freudian joke, we are curious whether ‘a cigar is sometimes more than a cigar’. Not only are the client’s words of interest, but phrasing, language construction, the embedded promises in the cultural landscape is worthy of a little analytic nudging and inquiry. I’m curious to explore the business of global beauty trends emerging in India and some unexpected, shrinking, side-effects.
The notion of the ‘ideal ego’ in psychoanalysis is a projected image with which the person identifies. In a simple sense, it is what someone would like to be. Advertising of course, promotes images of the ideal, fostering a sense of possibilities. Mental health, arguably concerns both the gap between reality and the ideal ego of oneself, as well as, the lengths a person is willing to go to achieve that ideal. Where might you ‘draw the line’ so-to-speak to achieve the modern beauty ideal? For some, plastic surgery would be a step “too far”, but Botox might be okay. If someone measures five foot four inches and attempts to be six feet by having surgical procedures on his body, it is easy to think the person has lost more than his psychological footing. In Richard Harrison’s “Silence of the Lambs”, we meet a serial killer, a former patient of Hannibal Lecter who murders women and uses their skin to sew together a construction of a woman that he can wear. Again, we are in the business of fantasy, yet most attempts to change the appearance of oneself are rarely as extreme. But at what point do attempts as bodily transformation enter the arena of madness and the macabre, or create other effects we are not prepared for?
In most scholarly centres around the world, you are likely to spend more time studying Freudian texts in the Media Studies and Literature departments than in the school of Psychology. So Freud’s contribution to critical analysis doesn’t merely help us subvert, or at least question the stories we tell ourselves, but those that are thrust upon us, and has been usefully given over to deconstruct literary texts, movies, reveal the narrative promises in advertising campaign, or indeed the rhetoric of war. As I have written in earlier articles, psychoanalysis asks us to give up our belief in magic and engage our critical thinking, here today, by focusing on beauty and body image.
The body has always featured as a means of participating in the cycle of capitalist production by the poor, the oppressed, or lower classes. Boxers use their physical might to enter into the money-making ring, and have for centuries used their bodies in prostitution, or to make themselves more marketable in the competition for to secure a financially dependable male. Today, many Indian women use whitening skin creams. Some may argue as a sort of colonial hangover that equates white with power, or a legacy of the caste system that equates fairer skin with those of higher status such as Brahmins and the Indian aristocracy. In his book, “Beauty Imagined”, the Harvard history professor points out that the first wave of the globalization of beauty, coincided “with the highpoint of Western imperialism, made it all but inevitable that being white was seen as possessing superior beauty—alongside superior everything else”.
A local psychotherapist here, who treats adolescent girls and women, attributes this body-bleaching to the stereotypes imparted to Indian girls having “very white western dolls as their models of perfect femininity,” describing the difficulty in former times of purchasing beautiful (not ugly) Indian brown faced dolls. Advertising of course shows us normative ideas of beauty ideals in a culture. The cream “Fair & Lovely”, (which thanks to the English pronunciation on T.V. sounds like “Fair & Ugly”) promises dejected looking dusky women that they will become a more marketable commodity by equating whiteness with either a better chances at an executive job, or leading the man of your dreams to be utterly love-struck by your paleness. Beauty is of course a huge global business estimated in the region of $335 billion. Globalisation, clearly more than the simply outsourcing of jobs to poorer countries and greater geographic mobility for some people, bringing with it a sense of flattening or MacDonaldisation of the world.
India’s beauty market for example, doubled in size between 2002 and 2007. Advertising of such products of course functions by identifications of beauty, i.e. that you will identify with that which is being sold to you. Only through debate, resistance and feedback does this industry’s message of what is ‘normal’ and desirable change. The Company Unilever, for example, that produces “Fair & Lovely”, also manufactures the “Dove” product of skin creams with an all-together different campaign in Europe, geared towards Western feminist sensibilities. Called the “Empowerment Campaign", it promotes identification with all manner of female body shapes, sizes and skin tones. Implicit in two very different campaigns, are on the one hand the message ‘you are a worthwhile woman if you are fair skinned’, on the other, revealing an equally culturally constructed notion of female beauty ‘you are worthwhile whatever shape and colour you are’.
How we relate to images of standard feminine beauty is to a degree, a matter of personal choice and preference, as well as, efforts at critical engagement with cultural messages. Psychoanalysis of course subverts any real sense of a thorough knowing of ourselves, or complete awareness of how we are affected by cultural imagery, through its insertion of the idea of the unconscious. We simply cannot know what ‘gets-in’ to us. Nevertheless, social activists continue to undermine rigid patriarchal definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. For instance, a few years ago in the U.S., there was a campaign by male and female sexual politics activists, attempting to subvert rigid gender stereotypes. In the period leading up to Christmas, they swapped the voice boxes in the popular dolls Barbie & Ken. On Christmas morning, when children pressed the voice button on their dolls, they found themselves in for a shock. Barbie, in her pink mini-dress said in a deep husky voice, “Hi, let’s go kill the enemy” and Ken in his army fatigues squeaked, “Hi do you think I look pretty today?”
Beauty capitalism is high-growth business in India. Hindustan Unilever is opening a Lakme beauty salon every week, and Jawed Habbit Hair & Beauty (JHHB) had 37 salons in 2006, rising to some 225 by the end of 2010. One rising form of outsourcing in India involves transferring the hair from the heads of the poor Indian women, so that it can be glued to the heads of women of Mumbai. Basically, hair extensions made from real hair. Only the poor do not receive any obvious direct financial benefit for giving away arguably one of the few things they own, the hair on their heads. They do this as a form of purification at their Hindu temples as they pray for food, shelter and education for their children. It is the temple-bosses who are the ones who receive the financial gains in the region of something like $100,000 for 400 kilos of hair. The women are not aware that their hair is sold. What happens to the money is unclear.
This is the focus of the rather brilliant documentary “Hair India”, by Raffaele Brunetti. It is a visual narrative of hair transactions from the poor to the relatively wealthy, imbued with human and geographic distance. The poor woman and the woman in the Mumbai salon who will adore the hair do not meet. The Temple priests sell the hair to a company called “Great Lengths” and ship them to their headquarters in Italy. Mumbai salons then purchase the hair which is shipped back to India, having been cleaned, prepared with the glues and whatever it is they do, packaged, prettified. Hair outsourcing in India, began during the 1980’s, but the boom took place as hair extensions became a popular some 10 years ago. Indian hair is considered the best in the market for its quality and length. Indian women from poor villages don't use any chemicals and take great care of their hair: they comb it frequently and only use coconut oil on it. “Great Lengths” hair extensions are allegedly the best in the world, their products adorning the heads of many Hollywood stars.
The film “Hair India” is a subtle documentary that gently emphasises the elegance and grace of the poor women, in contrast with the women of Mumbai involved in the world of hair extensions. The central character, Sangetta, who will have the hair extensions fitted is seen at Dishad’s hair salon in Mumbai, quizzing the salon staff for names of Hindi film celebrities who may also have such extensions. In the film, we meet the poor climbing the steps to the temple. We then cut to the Mumbai polyester-clad women tottering about on high heels in bars and fashion shows, as they survey sumptuous displays of food and shots of a tray weighted down with loaded glasses of alcohol. A poor woman Helmata and her family gaze into the windows of shops that sell televisions and rather poignantly, a shop that sells toilets and other bathroom fittings. Such things, the television (connecting us with the wider world?) and indoor toilets are presumably something she and her family are unlikely to afford. In a glamorous Mumbai bar, Sangetta turns to one of the women to discuss her hair extensions saying with a smirk, "everyone tells you you'll feel like a goddess".
While the hair extensions are being glued to Sangetta’ s head, by four salon workers, she looks up and says, “it’s like a dream sequence in a Hindi movie, it changes,” as she watches her hair stretching some two feet in length, amassed on her head and draped around her body rather like a monsoon cape. Sangetta appears to be creating her dream, an ideal version of herself that requires no more effort that sitting in a chair and dispensing her cash. Whether it works - whether her emerging dream, will in reality make her feel like a goddess - is not clear. What psychoanalysis gives us, why it is such a powerful theoretical framework, is that it continuous draws us to unexpected side –effects, things that happen that we don’t plan for – perhaps ridicule for having fake hair, glues that in the long term destroy one’s own hair, or perhaps, as research on excessive cosmetic surgery has shown, further depletion of one’s self-esteem.
As international standards of beauty invariably depict tall and thin women, it is hardly surprising that other Western di-eases associated with body-images are imported into India. A recent study concerns the rise of teen-anorexia in India in the age group 15-25, across 10 Cities including Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata and Bangalore. The findings suggest that high numbers of both boys and girls are using fat burners, self-induced vomiting, fasting, and diet pills in an effort to be thin. The authors say, “Today, even kids are not off-limits to the celebrity-driven trend of staying slim to look perfect and are dieting and starving themselves to achieve desired results”. For example, the researchers found that in their 12-15 year olds sample, some 30% were involved in dieting at least three times a week. But if this is a straight forward matter of simply internalising external images, how does this work?
The most virulent disease of body image and weight loss, not infrequently leading to death, is Anorexia Nervosa. According to DSM IV, the ‘bible’ of mental disorders, the key features of the illness are (1) a refusal to maintain a healthy weight range for age and height, or failure to make expected weight gains at times of growth and physical development, (2) Fear of gaining weight or becoming fat, (3) loss of periods (menstrual cycle) in women who are not using any external source of estrogen, e.g. oral contraceptives. I am told by several doctors here in Mumbai, that the main middle-class hospitals here are seeing young urban girls, from middle class family’s presenting starvation related diseases that haven’t been seen for over twenty years.
Traditionally, Anorexia is viewed within the framework of individual psychopathology. However, Helen Malson’s research on Anorexia, considers ways this dis-ease has been interpreted from a feminist perspective, placing it firmly and appropriately in my view, within the socio-economic, cultural and political context:
“women's anorexic (over-)control of their/our bodies, has, for example, been interpreted as a response to our lack of control over other aspects of our lives (Lawrence, 1984), whilst the diminutive proportions of the 'anorexic' body have been interpreted as an embodiment of women's subordinated and 'child-like' social status (Chernin, 1983) and as a rejection of or ambivalence towards traditional femininity (Orbach, 1993), as well as an (over) conformity to contemporary cultural dictates about 'idea' (heterosexual) femininity (Boskind-Lodahl, 1976).
What she further problematizes, is not only the assumption that the saturation of images of skinny-ideals of womanhood as something people over-identify with and are stupidly duped by, but in a sense points to the potent rebellion that maybe hidden in the refusal to menstruate and develop womanly attributes, such as breasts. She is in fact saying, something more is going on here than the interpretation of swallowing whole the images of ideal womanhood. The psychoanalytic theorist Jacqueline Rose makes a similar point when she says that, “Most women do not painlessly slip into their roles as women, if indeed they do at all.”
She goes on to say:
“What distinguished psychoanalysis from sociological accounts of gender, is that whereas in the latter, the internalisation of norms is assumed roughly to work, the basic premise and indeed starting point of psychoanalysis is that it does not.”
Therefore, might it be that anorexia is a symptom, a Freudian one indeed, that the internalisation fails? In Malson’s deeply sensitive in-depth interviews with girls diagnosed with Anorexia, she encouraged them to talk about what they feel they achieve by starving and becoming thin. They tell her it gives them a sense of “a sort of hiding”, “a way to disappear”, “something that’s my own”, interpreted by Malson, as “A body that appears to disappear and that signifies an attempt at (feminine) identity put under erasure.” She does not ignore the reality that “self-starvation results in a very real destruction and de-materialisation of the body,” but hints that this links with the way the woman becomes a sort of “background text for advertising consumer products.”
Susie Orbach, a British feminist and activist since the 1970’s, popularly known for her book “Fat is a Feminist Issue”, and as Princess Diana’s psychotherapist, is concerned that younger people “are more interested in "being something rather than actually contributing something. It goes along with the whole celebrity culture, with consumerism.” What does this mean for young women? She says, “I think young women are still very hampered by feelings of un-entitlement, but covered up with the defense of 'we can do it, we're great, and we’re ambitious’.”
The desire to be attractive will always be with us and may have some element of Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ roots, particularly here in India, where gender inequality remains strong. How attached we are to impossible masquerades of ourselves seems to be the heart of the issue, linked to our engagement in gender politics in refining and questioning what the construction of the identity of “woman” means personally to each and every one of us. When I was student, the phrase “The Personal is Political”, was and continues to be a phrase I identify with. Watching signs and symptoms of Anorexia infiltrate India and the rising death rates of young urban girls that will inevitably follow must signal that at the very least the importance of critical engagement with the side-effects of beauty consumerism. Seeing beautiful brown Indian women turn white in front of our eyes on our T.V. screens and the effects of damaging skin through bleach, seems no less insidious than a shadow of colonialism hanging over this amazing country.
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