BODIES, by Susie Orbach [Introduction, Chapters 1 & 2]

Susie Orbach

In a previous post mostly about other matters I pulled a few quotations from Orbach's book Bodies. I'd now like to look a bit more carefully at this book.

One of its dominant claims, reiterated variously and copiously supported is that in the contemporary world, our bodies status has changed quite radically. 

The individual is now deemed accountable for his or her body and judged by it. "Looking after oneself" is a moral value. The body is becoming akin to a worthy personal project (5). […] We can fashion it through artifice, through the naturalistic routes of bio-organic products or through a combination of these, but whatever the means, our body is our calling card, vested with showing the results of our hard work and watchfulness or, alternatively, our failure and sloth (6).

This change in body consciousness is coincident with a change in how bodies are used. Orbach observes that, at least in the west, few of us make things any more (7). Rather than being tinkers or tailors or whatever, a huge percentage of us spend our days sitting in front of computers, and/or doing service jobs of whatever sort. Our bodies are still shaped by our work, but not as they were in the past. Now, given the image saturation of our lives, so much of which figures bodies for us to desire or identify with or aspire to, "Our bodies are and have become a form of work. The body is turning from being the means of production to the production itself" (8).

While the common cultural "wisdom" everywhere insists that this change is for the good, Orbach diagnoses a profound instability in contemporary body consciousness. While she argues that "the natural body is fiction" (8) she also contends "that current cultural discourse on the body means that we have entered a new epoch of body destabilization, and that there is a new franticness surrounding the body induced by social forces which are absorbed and transmitted in the family, where we first acquire our bodily sense" (9). 

What Freud showed us, first of all, was that a "natural" human sexuality was a misperception. Sexual desire is replete with conflict, longing and fantasy. In our epoch, I contend, the body itself has grown as complicated a place as sexuality was for Freud's. It too is shaped and misshaped by our earliest encounters with parents and carers, who also contain in themselves the forces and imperatives of our culture, with its panoply of injunctions about how the body should appear and be attended to. Their sense of their own bodily lacks and strengths, their hopes and fears about physicality, will play themselves out on the child. (12)

This is an interesting thesis, that "the body itself has grown as complicated a place as sexuality was" and one which I find I am swayed by. Certainly Orbach's book provides a great deal of evidence to support the contention. She also says in the first chapter of this text that "New theories of psychological development are required to address the primary terrain of our human physicality, and in this book I suggest ways of thinking about the body that provide, I believe, the starting points for a theory of body development just as compelling as our existing theories of mind" (13-4). So, my task as I work through this will be to see just what those starting points are.

Everything above is from the Introduction, I turn now to Chapter 1 "Bodies in Our Time"…

This chapter goes in some surprising directions. It opens with and returns often to the story of "Andrew" a man who spent a great deal of time searching for someone to remove parts of his body. He felt that he could never feel "whole" - what did he wish to lose? Both legs above the knee. Orbach acknowledges how creepy this can make people feel but she is interested in what desires Andrew has which would produce this feeling in him. As it turns out, because Andrew was never able to convince anyone to lop off both of his legs, in time he did it himself and - per his doctor's subsequent reports - Andrew is doing much better psychologically now without them. But one cannot help but to wish that there was more information about this. Better how? & in a lacanian mode, the quest to feel "whole" is clearly Imaginary and neither the loss of the legs or any other change to the physical body can possibly be the solitary obstacle preventing the impossibility of wholeness from being achieved. 

Orbach also spends some time talking about phantom limbs and citing some of the better research about this phenomena (22-3). This part was all quite interesting and seems to have solid support. Briefly, the situation seems to be that the body remaps itself and might derive sensations from the absent, now phantom, limb, from some other place on the body. She mentions one subject who lost a leg from the knee down who now feels it pulsing and tingling when he has an orgasm (23). Coming out of this discussion she then turns to the feeling of being "born in the wrong body" familiar now in the cultural discourse about transgender. Orbach admits to her initial difficulties working with transpersons and also her eventual acceptance of their claim to have been "born in the wrong body." These are complicated issues and questions and as much as I like Orbach's book, I wish she had spent a bit more time on these in this chapter rather than reiterating so many of the claims about the body made in the intro. There is also something in this discussion that bothers me too, but I'll get there in a moment.

In a footnote to this chapter Orbach mentions a guy named Jonathan Miller who in discussing the work by Ramachandran on phantom limbs said something interesting (though he is not quoted directly, this is Orbach): 

Jonathan Miller (…) made a profound point about the body-brain relationship when he suggested that we all have phantom limbs all of the time and that it is only when we lose an actual limb that we become aware of the fact that our idea and experience of the limb live in the brain. (ch.1 n.5)

Again this invokes the Imaginary for anyone with a lacanian approach. I also like Miller's idea a lot. The Imaginary Body is surely a phantom body, just as much as the mirror image is. I'll track down the references Orbach provides for this note eventually, but I can't help but to wish that she'd foregrounded this 'phantom' quality of the body more strongly here and throughout the book.

Now my gripe with this chapter. As I said already, Orbach is very compassionate and understanding about the feeling of being "born in the wrong body" and she takes very seriously, without pathologizing, the desire to have one's genitals refashioned. I cannot escape some thoughts about the Imaginary in this connection, as noted above. None of us will ever be "whole" in this perspective. As such, if the idea is that sexual reassignment is the cure for everything a persons suffers or that it will make anyone a whole, complete, person, etc - then I cannot not see a fantasy here which could impose even greater suffering when it fails to be the solution to all things. But at the same time, I suspect that many people who seek this do not assume that it will solve every problem at all and they are, in Orbach's terms, seeking a physical body that reflects better their own self-conception. In that sense, it does not seem that radically different from my desire to lose a few pounds around the middle, or to wish my thinning hair would return to its lost fullness. But what troubles me in Orbach's discussion is a feeling that the desire for sexual reassignment is the litmus test for authentic trans experience. Here is the passage that most troubles me in Orbach's chapter;

For Aleshia Brevard, as for Michaela [two M2F transwomen discussed earlier in the text], there was a tangible need to change her body. Not for her the adaptation of cross-dressers such as Thai lady boys, the young men who masquerade as beautiful young women for the delectation of Western men whose homosexuality shames them in ways that lead them to seek out masculine bodies disguised as those of young women. (26)

The more I think through the implications here the more I am bugged by this passage. First let's consider the position attributed to "Thai lady boys". In Orbach's account what they do begins and ends with cross-dressing. These persons are seemingly inauthentic, and presumably cross-dressing itself is inauthentic somehow as well, or perhaps it is only inauthentic as an exemplification of transgender desire. What bugs me about this is its sweeping inaccuracy. I have a friend who is not Thai but Malay and who was thrown out of the house - once and for all - at a very young age because s/he thought and felt herself to be a she and her father wanted her to remain a son. This person lives her life as a woman, but still has the genitals she was born with, though she has used hormones and was saving money for breast implants. The last time we spoke about these things she was not interested in having her genitals refashioned. But what bugs me is the idea that unless one wishes to take this specific step that there is something somehow false or inauthentic going on. Perhaps in Orbach's understanding, a "Thai lady boy" is a person who has no self-identification as a woman at all and is rather a young man who pretends as such while being a prostitute. But really now - one need look no further than wikipedia to read about "Kathoeys" in Thailand and elsewhere and while it is true that a disproportionate amount of such persons find no other work than as prostitutes, this does not seem enough of a fact to sustain her claim here. It is tempting to see Orbach herself as caught up in a sort of genital essentialism, which even if it mirrors the desire of some transgendered persons to refashion their own genitals, seems wholly inadequate as a way of measuring the authenticity of anyone's desire. A couple of years ago I read Don Kulick's fabulous, fascinating and at times scary book Travesti (about this book, or download it here). And as this book discusses at great length, Travestis for the most part do not want to lose their male genitals, and think of themselves as a 'third sex'. They even ridicule the desire to surgically alter the genitals in this way (while going to great and dangerous lengths to alter the shapes of their asses). Their condemnation of people who decide to do this is surely problematic, but it would seem just as problematic to condemn those who do not make this decision, as, it feels to me, Orbach does. 

Also troubling about this passage in Orbach is how the imputed inauthenticity of the Thai lady boy is not really even considered as such. What seems to prove it to Orbach is the other for whom she sees it as constructed and why. She writes, that they do this "for the delectation of Western men whose homosexuality shames them in ways that lead them to seek out masculine bodies disguised as those of young women" (26). Are we really to assume that the many thousands of people who do this, often starting at very young ages, do so for no other reasons than to sell their bodies to Western men? & then, let us assume that there are men - why not? - who are so ashamed of their homosexual desire that they can only accept and act upon it with a trans prostitute. Even if this were true in many cases, can it really be the only answer? Is homosexual desire only authentic if its object is a male body that performs the culturally mandated masculine body as such (what of heterosexual desire)? How would Orbach judge those men who marry a lady boy and treat her as a wife from then on? Is this a marriage predicated upon shame and disavowed homosexuality? Also, her presumption seems to be that those who turn to lady boys live their lives as heterosexual men, but what if a gay man were to desire a transwoman? Would this be a case of a "gay man whose heterosexuality shames him in ways that lead him to seek out masculine bodies disguised as those of young women"?  

I do not mean to discount shame, repression, the proliferation of images, or any other force which shapes, constrains and in some cases constitutes sexual desire, but at this moment Orbach seems a bit rigid and she risks simply shifting the essentialism to a new zone - the genitals. Of course in saying that, I suspect that were she to read this, she would turn out to have rather more to say about these issues. But, I'm working with what she does have to say here. 

Her next chapter "Shaping the Body" again shifts between narratives and more scientific findings of various sorts. In hopes of getting just at the stuff that interests me and which might act as the "starting points" for a new body theory, I'll be selective here. 

The opening pages and the narratives that are offered there all incline one to support a basic point about the importance of the body image as developed in those crucial childhood years. Using lacanian language, I might say that Orbach has highlighted the ways in which the Imaginary Body is constructed, by looking primarily at what happens when its stability is challenged or demands are placed upon it which require that it be otherwise than it is. We'll all know that children learn languages better than adults, and voice is surely an embodied feature of human existence. Just like with the voice, we develop the Imaginary Body during those same crucial years. Most folks who know any Lacan know the Mirror Stage article. Fewer know anything about the Lacan of the late 60s and 70s. He is not specific about this in Seminar XVII, but as I have argued elsewhere, that seminar's "discourse theory" makes some interesting changes to his theoretical project and it seems to me that they also license us to rethink the sort of "once and for all" understandings of the mirror stage that are so common in the secondary lit. 

My position on that stuff is that the Mirror Stage essay is perhaps better understood as logically foundational, but not really needing to refer any specific moment in a child's development. As such, do we recognize what we "are" for the gaze of others via a mirror, or reflections, or by modeling what our body is like via another body? Yes, absolutely. & is that "logical moment" relatively momentous? Again, yes - but it may not happen all in a flash, it may not be a product simply of images, it is likely something which, while having to have had an originary moment, is nonetheless ongoing. That is to say, I think that the Body Imaginary - as representation of the ego - is for the subject a master signifier or a cluster of such, and as Seminar XVII makes clear (and differs from what came before in Lacan's work) master signifiers are not singular, they can and do change. If these things were not the case, how is it that I am not shocked and dismayed when I look into a mirror and fail to see myself as I was at the moment when I first recognized my image in a mirror? 

Now to return to Orbach, she discusses at some length the "mirror neuron system". Referring to certain scientific studies, Orbach summarizes the findings;

When we watch another human being making a movement, whether it is sticking out a tongue, carrying packages, swerving, dancing, eating or clapping their hands, our neurons fire in the same way, as if we ourselves were making the movement. From the brain's perspective (…) watching is pretty similar to doing. The brain has a built-in empathic and mimicking capacity. It translates what is seen through the eyes into the equivalent of doing and is structured to absorb and prepare itself for what we may have not yet mastered. (42)

The basic insight of these reflections on the mirror neuron system does not - to me at least - seem radically unlike that of the Mirror Stage essay, particularly if one does not shut it down as a sort of "once and for all" moment in our psychic development.

The mirror neuron system, then, enables us to relate at a deep level to one another. It allows us to see in the face of another what she or he is experiencing and then to have a corresponding feeling ourselves. (44) 

Orbach spends some time looking at what happens when this system is under-developed and wonders as well about the negative effects on people when it is inadequately reinforced through nurturing behaviors, specifically touch, which in "the last twenty years or so (…) has come to the fore as being crucial to psychological well-being. Touch is the most basic and fundamental of human experiences" (48). That is, the Body Imaginary (as I will persist on calling it here for the moment) is not simply an image-system, it is also comprised of tactile, kineasthetic, olfactory, auditory, and other inputs. Orbach writes;

Every gesture we make, the very way we move, our grace or lack of it, our physical confidence or unease, reflect both the country and local culture we have grown up in and the particular interpretation of our gestures that our mothers and those close to us have passed on. They do this by giving us our specific bodily gestures and guides to movement every bit as much as they give us specific words and language with which to communicate. (50)

At this point it seems clear to me that many of these scientific findings are useful to think about and that the extant accounts of psychic development in psychoanalysis need to take them on board and see where they lead. If Lacan did place too much stress on the image in the Imaginary, that is not all he had to say about it - anxiety, lust and aggression are equally Imaginary in his account and these affects (loosely called) are bodily affects (as would be all). Without again going into the question of affect for lacanian psychoanalysis or psychoanalysis more generally, I think there is an easy case to be made that the body itself needs to be brought more fully into psychoanalytic thinking.

I'll stop there for now and try to get through a couple more chapters of Orbach tomorrow.