BODIES, by Susie Orbach [a bit of Chapter 3 & a few other thoughts]

[This is long overdue, for the hypothetical reader who was hanging on the edge after my previous post about this book, but here it is anyway]

"Google > Images  "Body Image" - this image meant to help you select a bikini

OK, before I finish Orbach's Bodies, I see that I have neglected to mention something important. Orbach is a therapist - something I didn't stress in what I wrote about this text before. So this issue of the body image (or Body Imaginary) being out of sync or at odds with the body of the person is something that she talks about a lot in reference to her patients. In the interests of space I skipped over these people's narratives almost entirely, but the 2nd chapter ends with such a narrative. One of Orbach's points throughout this book is that while, yes, Freud did in fact recognize something crucial in his time - that problems in the psyche could result in symptoms that effected the body - that in our time, and it seems in Orbach's clinical work, that there is also a body distress which derives from the body itself and cannot be cured simply by attending to the person's thoughts (whether conscious or unconscious). I am not entirely sure that I am always convinced by her claims about this as in each account used to convince the reader that this so, it seems to me that there remain questions about the subjects' desires (both analyst and analysand) and that in explicating the therapeutic progress that we are given an account which maps this via language (thus opening the door to understanding it as language that has been lost/repressed and which then plays out its effects through the body, much as Lacan's account runs, at least in the early & middle periods). 

Chapter 3 "Speaking Bodies" concerns itself with transference, or in Orbach's preferred term, countertransference - especially when it takes place from body to body, thus the speaking bodies of the title. I've not seen analytic case studies that mentioned this and so found it quite interesting. Orbach is noting not simply (counter)transference at the level of thoughts or attitudes but as it manifests itself in the therapist's body. If I were to embrace a steady skepticism about the claim I mentioned above regarding the body as locus of this distress, then how is it that this happens precisely? It seems that, in Orbach's account, when the analysand has body hatred let us say, and whatever other transferential issues are going on, that the analyst's body responds to the analysand's body, such that the body hatred of the analysand produces a bodily feeling in the therapist which is a transferential response. In such a moment the therapist's "body, her emotional state, become a stethoscope-like instrument for hearing what might be askew" (63). 

Orbach tells the story of Herta, one patient with a particularly severe body hatred;

Herta's relationship to her own body was twofold. It was an object to her and it was a trouble to her. She had no experience of just living in it. She knew her body - which was an "it" to her - by its burdensome nature. She continually had to attend to it, whether dealing with the ungracious symptoms of loose, sometimes bloody and urgent bowel movements or the severe abdominal cramping that characterises colitis. (65)

What is perhaps surprising is Orbach's transferential response to this which she describes as "a deep physical pleasure, as though I were a purring pussycat. Every part of me felt alive and contented in a way I had never been aware of before" (64). Faced with this experience while pursuing an analysis with Herta, Orbach ponders her own bodily (counter)transference, concluding that "my purring response to her made me want to focus on what her body was needing in its own right" (66). She writes of needing to "enter directly into the hatred Herta had of her body" (66) and to get Herta to 1st accept this so that some new relationship to the body could be developed. & here again, this accepting of the hatred and establishing a new relationship, do they not seem to unfold in and as language? 

Returning to a consideration of her own bodily response to Herta, Orbach writes;

In order to give up her sense of living in a hated body, Herta had created for the two of us in the room a body which felt amply comfortable and alive. It was as though she were starting all over again, only this time with a maternal analyst figure not plagued by memories of poverty and war and anxiety about feeding, but a maternal substitute who sat contentedly and calmly. Her ingenuity had conjured up what she needed. She couldn't give herself a neutral body, let alone a wondrously happy one, but she could evoke one in me, in the hope that I could then bestow it on her. (67-8)

I wonder at this moment what exactly a lacanian analyst would make of this situation were they conducting this analysis. Orbach terms and the psychoanalysts that she references make it clear that she is operating with rather different theoretical commitments. & I have no answer to the question I am wondering about, just the wondering. 

Orbach discusses the length of therapy, something which many complain about or use as a way to dismiss psychoanalysis or, at least these days, anything which takes much longer than writing a prescription. She writes;

Why can't pain, once understood and engaged with, allow for a speedy rewrite of a physical or mental template and thus bring quick relief? It is frustrating. Our brains seem to work so fast to grasp things and yet so slowly to change. A way to think about this is to remind ourselves that the human animal has a long gestation period outside the womb, during which the baby absorbs and personalizes that which will make it human. If we use language as a model and recognise that it takes two to four years for language to become personal and a part of oneself, then the idea that therapy is akin to absorbing a new language, only more so, begins to make sense. (68-9)

Now this could be Exhibit A in an insurance directive about why not to cover psychotherapy. But, be that as it may, the explanation is interesting. I have some doubts about the ease with which Orbach tells us how long it takes to learn a new language - I have lots of personal experience of trying and trying and never truly learning a language - and if this is so, might we imagine that there will be patients who cannot learn the equivalent "language" which will allow them to find a new body image(Imaginary) which might ease their suffering and distress? Surely so. 

There is much else in this book that is worth thinking through but as I have finished it and am reading other things now which I have not had time to post about, I'm going to wrap this up here and now by looking at one critique that Orbach levels at the turn toward performativity in folks like Butler. A lengthy quote;

It has become a feature of postmodernist thought to celebrate multiplicity, to elevate fluidity over knowing and complexity over simplicity, and to see embodiment, like femininity and masculinity, as something we achieve through performing or enacting the body we want to have. In this kind of theorizing, it is believed that the body can be anything we want it to be, with corporeality no more than a symbolic construct.

Playful and enriching as such ideas can be within literary theory, it is painfully apparent that they are not playful or enriching for those whose corporeal rudderlessness propels them to seek extreme solutions to what they experience as their physical incongruities. Postmodern theory is insufficient to cope with the demands of the post-industrial body. It celebrates fragmentation, a fragmentation that, in fact, requires understanding, deconstructing, nourishing and then knitting together. (…) I know from the labile bodies that I encounter in the consulting room that their "owners" are on a search for anchoring which, once secured, perhaps allows for playfulness and masquerade to follow. But there needs to be a body there for the person in the first instance. (…) The celebrating of numerous self/body states that postmodernists engage in seems to applaud the very distress of the pre-integrated body. The celebration of multiplicity unwittingly dismisses the ways in which the individual seeks a bodily coherence. (91-2)

I've heard things like this before. & the point seems valid to me. If one assumed that one was the hybrid postmodern subject par excellence and answered a DSM-based questionaire, I wonder what diagnosis that insurance manual would spit out for you? I doubt it would declare that you were sane and healthy. Though I've enough native distrust of the DSM system that it becomes a balancing act of sorts...