Defining the body

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I’ve been interested in the question of how we get a body, partly because over the last 40 years, as a psychoanalyst, I’ve seen a huge increase in body-based problems. There are many theories contested and agreed upon about how we get a mind but, somehow, the whole question of the body has been left out of the story.

It’s useful to paraphrase both Simone de Beauvoir – “Women are made, not born” – and Winnicott, the British psychoanalyst and paediatrician, who said, “There is no such thing as a baby. Wherever you see a baby, you see a mother-baby unit.” I’ve been applying those two ideas to the body, arguing that wherever you see a body, you see a body that has been made, not simply born. Bodies are an outcome of the body-to-body relations around them.

Expressions of a distressed mind?

In my discipline, we tend to look at body-based problems as being expressions of psychological distress: a paralysed arm, speaking in tongues, or believing that you are pregnant – pseudocyesis. There is a psychological motivation behind these, but there’s also a sense of the body itself as being troubled, and it’s worth exploring the whole question of how a body comes into being and what body distress might express in its own terms.

If you take something very simple, like eczema, a skin disease, it would be discussed in general as the weeping of a mind. The mind hurts so much that feelings can’t be expressed: the person can’t cry, they can’t tolerate the irritation that they’re feeling inside of them. I think that’s perfectly valid, but I also want to look at the fact that perhaps it’s an expression of a body that’s never been accepted easily, partly because of the way it’s been introduced to itself, and therefore it’s an expression also of bodily distress, that it’s a body saying I need attention, I need comfort and soothing for myself.

The mother-baby interaction

If we think about the development of a body in early infancy, almost everything that occurs in the mother-baby interaction – I’ll say the mother, but I mean the mother as in “the carer” – is expressed as a psychological relation. However, it’s also, and primarily, a body-to-body relation. Physical exchange is central – whether we are observing the early holding, early feeding and early containment.

Today, many mothers come to parenting with very troubled bodies. The body that they are bringing to their infant is a body that is often full of upset, anxiety or preoccupation about getting their pre-pregnancy body back; a body that’s never been quite comfortable with itself, that is now trying to understand and surrender to the baby’s needs. It is a body in conflict because the mother has her own conflicted needs. It is in this sense that it’s worth looking at the very early body-to-body relationship and not interpret it as structures that are only in the mind.

The body as a battleground

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Today, the terrain of the body is changing so that it’s become an unrecognised battleground. There are various societal forces that are impacting on the body. There is demand that we have a certain kind of body: a body that’s camera-ready the whole time, a body that can twirl for the camera, a body that can seduce – little girls of three and four already playing to the camera. A body always ready for display. There are enormous industries which are impacting on the body and making a great deal out of money by implying that bodies need to be corrected. At the same time, there is a parallel notion that despite the prevalence of bodies on screens, bodies are going to be disappearing, bodies are only surface, and with the development of AI – synthetic biology, technologies of change – bodies will become dematerialised.

This contrasts with notions of ownership of the body. We see this in war, where rape is still a weapon, or the abduction of children for doctrination into extremist ideologies. We see it in the United States now, where there are arguments about whether the mother or the foetus has primary rights. Abortion has become a deeply contested arena and in certain States, if the mother has cancer, the rights of the foetus trumps her right to treatment. All these phenomena combine to create a tense new battleground for the body.

Westernising bodies

As we look around the world, we can see the impact of the Westernised body. The shaving of jaw lines in South Korea and the 50% of girls in Seoul who have an airline eyelid insertion. In China, to get the length of a Westernised body, there’s an operation to insert a ten-centimetre rod in the upper thigh. In Brazil, which used to prize bottoms, there is now a massive amount of plastic surgery for breasts. It’s part of the cultural story. These procedures are so commonplace they appear innocent, but they actually constitute a battle and an assault on the very notion of a body. It’s very hard to have an idea of body integrity when every single bit of your body can be transformed.

What’s happening now is that 6-year-old girls are being invited to play with cosmetic surgery apps to consider what they will change when they’re 15, 16, 17. These are deadly games, and we’re now seeing a huge preponderance of 16 year olds showing up at their doctor’s and at obstetricians demanding labiaplasty. They are already so concerned, frightened even, that their genitals don’t visually conform to some pre-adolescent notion of a labia, that they feel unable to feel excited about their growing womanhood and their sexuality.

Gender norms and how we are raised

Thinking in very broad gender terms, a mother might think she brought up her children exactly the same, but if you actually observe how she encourages a child to run up the stairs or climb a ladder, there will be a difference. There will be caution expressed vis-à-vis girls, even if she thinks she’s not doing it. She will override her caution when it comes to boys.

There’s also evidence that in every culture, boys are held longer than girls, they are potty trained later, they are weaned later and each feed is longer. It’s not about the biology per se, it’s about our notions of what a masculine body is that will then shape that boy’s relation to his body. There’s something about a surrender that is allowed a bit longer, which is more constrained when a mother is relating to her own daughter, with whose body she needs to mark with a kind of restriction. She does so unconsciously, in the way that she herself has learnt to be constrained.

The future of the body

Photo by Anton Gvozdikov

We are being invited to consider that we will be an algorithm that will be able to feel touch without having a body, smell without having a body, see without having a body and have cognition without having a body – without being embodied. This is being proposed all the time: that AI is going to be the solution for human intelligence to inhabit the world. We’re overpopulated. There are no food supplies. We’re going to be having eco problems. The idea of us being disembodied and being in a chip is one of the solutions. It starts with robotics and goes onto dematerialisation.

Now, one of the things that’s really interesting at the moment is that if you look at any of the disembodied bodies in AI, they are all shown in plastic versions of women, particularly Sophia, who bats her eyelashes at us, smiles ever so sweetly and pushes her head in a flirty way, overriding the sense that she’s a machine. That seems to me preparation for accepting lots and lots more AI. Look how attractive it is. Look how straightforward this is. I think the long-term notion is that we will be bodiless. We won’t really need our bodies at all.

Discover more about

Our relationship to our bodies

Orbach, S. (2019). Bodies. Profile Books.

Orbach, S. (2019, August 23). Will this be the last generation to have bodies that are familiar to us? The Guardian.

Orbach, S. (2017). In Therapy: The Unfolding Story. Wellcome Collection.

What is happening to our bodies?