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Inferring Meaning from Context

  Inferring Meaning from Context:

Instruction: Read the following text about body image and answer the questions bellow.

Body Image

“Body image” can be considered synonymous with such terms as “body concept” and “body scheme.” Broadly speaking, the term pertains to how the individual perceives his own body. It does not imply that the individual’s concept of his body is represented by a conscious image; rather, it embraces his collective attitudes, feelings, and fantasies about his body without regard to level of awareness.

Basic to most definitions of body image is the view that it represents the manner in which a person has learned to organize and integrate his body experiences. Body image concepts are important for an understanding of such diverse phenomena as adjustment to body disablement, maintenance of posture and spatial orientation, personality development, and cultural differences.

At a common-sense level, the pervasive significance of the body image is evident in widespread preoccupation with myths and stories that concern body transformation (such as the change from human to werewolf form). It is evident, too, in the vast expenditure of time and energy that goes into clothing and reshaping the body (for example, plastic surgery) for the purpose of conforming to idealized standards of appearance.

Historical background. Interest in the body image appeared first in the work of neurologists who observed that brain damage could produce bizarre alterations in a person’s perception of his body. Patients suffering from brain damage manifested such extreme symptoms as the inability to recognize parts of their own bodies and the assignment of entirely different identities to the right and left sides of their bodies. Interest in body image phenomena was further reinforced by observations that neurotic and schizophrenic patients frequently had unusual body feelings. Paul Schilder (1935), neurologist, psychiatrist, and early influential theorist, reported the following kinds of distortions in the schizophrenic patient: a sense of alienation from his own body (depersonalization), inability to distinguish the boundaries of his body, and feelings of transformation in the sex of his body. Surgeons recorded unusual body experiences in patients with amputations and noted that amputees typically hallucinated the absent member as if it were still present. The hallucinated body member was designated a “phantom limb.”

The neurologist Henry Head, another early influential theorist, took the view that a body schema was essential to the functioning of the individual (Head et al. 1920). He theorized that each person constructs a picture or model of his body that constitutes a standard against which all body movements and postures are judged. He applied the term “schema” to this standard. His description of the body schema underscored its influence upon body orientation, but he noted also that it served to integrate other kinds of experiences.

Equally prominent in early body image formulations was the psychoanalytic work of Sigmund Freud. Freud considered the body concept basic to the development of identity and ego structure. He conceived of the child’s earliest sense of identity as first taking the form of learning to discriminate between his own body and the outer world. Thus, when the child is able to perceive his own body as something apart from its environs, he presumably acquires a basis for distinguishing self from nonself.

Freud’s theory of libidinal development was saturated with key references to body attitudes. He conceptualized the individual’s psychosexual development in terms of the successive localization of energy and sensitivity at oral, anal, and genital body sites. It was assumed that as each of these sites successively acquired increased prominence and sensitivity, corresponding needs were aroused to seek out agents capable of providing stimulation. Presumably, too, when a person failed to mature and was fixated at one of the earlier erogenous zones (oral or anal), he was left to deal with adult experiences in terms of a body context more appropriate to the way of life of a child.

Many of Freud’s concepts of personality development assign importance to changes in the perceptual and erogenous dominance of body sectors. Psychoanalytic theorists continue to focus upon body attitudes as significant in understanding many forms of behavior deviance (for example, schizophrenia and fetishism). Indeed, psychoanalytical concepts have had a major influence upon body image theory and research.

Schilder drew attention to other body image phenomena in his book The Image and Appearance of the Human Body (1935), where he formulated a variety of theoretical concepts that were phrased largely in psychoanalytic terms. He suggested that the body image is molded by one’s interactions with others, and to the extent that these interactions are faulty, the body image will be inadequately developed. Schilder’s book contained rich descriptions of how the individual perceives his own body in diverse situations. He analyzed body experiences that characterize awakening, falling asleep, assuming unusual body positions, ingesting certain drugs, and undergoing schizophrenic disorganization. One idea he particularly emphasized was that sensations of body disintegration are likely to typify those who masochistically direct anger against themselves.

Schilder concerned himself with determining whether specific brain areas are linked with the body image. He was one of a group of neurologists who made persistent attempts to relate body image distortions observed in brain-damaged patients to the sites of the brain lesions. Considerable evidence has accumulated that damage to the parietal lobes selectively disrupts the individual’s ability to perceive his body realistically.

Phantom limb. Historically, the phantom limb phenomenon has played a significant role in calling attention to the problems of organizing body perceptions. Such observers as Head and his colleagues (1920), Lhermitte (1939), and Schilder (1935) were puzzled by the fact that normal persons typically hallucinated the presence of body members lost through injury or amputation. Such hallucinations implied that the individual had a “picture” of his body which persisted even when it was no longer realistically accurate. Controversy still exists about whether the phantom experience is primarily a result of a compensatory process occurring in the central nervous system or of persisting peripheral sensations evoked by injured tissue in the stump. Evidence indicates that while stump sensations play a part in the phantom experience, central factors are of greater importance. Interesting questions have been stimulated by observations of the phantom limb: for example, why does the duration of phantom experiences vary markedly between individuals? And why does the phantom not appear when body parts are gradually absorbed (as in leprosy) rather than suddenly removed?

Research. Well-controlled experiments in the area of body image are relatively new, most scientific studies having been carried out since 1945.

Human figure drawing. One of the oldest and most frequently used techniques for the study of the body image makes use of human figure drawing. It has been suggested that when an individual is asked to draw a picture of a person, he projects into his drawing indications of how he experiences his body. Some investigators have proposed that such indicators as the size of the figure drawn and difficulty in depicting specific body areas provide information about the individual’s body concept. There have been claims that the figure drawing can be used to measure such variables as feelings of body inferiority and anxiety about sexual adequacy. However, despite a profusion of studies, there is no evidence that figure drawing is an effective method of tapping body image attitudes. It is true that in some instances it has proved sensitive to the existence of actual body defects. For example, individuals with crippling defects have been shown to introduce analogous defects in their figure drawings. Moreover, there have been some demonstrations that figure-drawing indicators of body disturbance are higher in schizophrenic than in normal subjects. However, no consistently successful indices of body attitudes have been derived. Indeed, the problem of using the figure drawing to evaluate body image has been enormously complicated by evidence that artistic skill may so strongly influence the characteristics of drawings as to minimize the importance of most other factors.

Attitudes toward the body. Another approach to evaluating the body image has revolved about measuring the subject’s dissatisfaction with regions of his body. Procedures have been devised that pose for him the task of indicating how positively or negatively he views his body. These procedures vary from direct ratings of dissatisfaction with parts of one’s body to judgments regarding the comparability of one’s body to pictured bodies. It has been found that men are most likely to be dissatisfied with areas of their bodies that seem “too small”; whereas women focus their self-criticism upon body sectors that appear to be “too large.” Also, evidence has emerged that dissatisfaction with one’s body is accompanied by generalized feelings of insecurity and diminished self-confidence.

Perceived body size. One of the most promising lines of body image research has dealt with perceived body size. This work concerns the significance to be attached to the size an individual ascribes to parts of his body. The individual’s concept of his body size is often inaccurate and exaggerated in the direction of largeness or smallness as a function of either situational influences or specific body attitudes. It has been demonstrated that estimates of body size vary in relation to the total spatial context of the individual, the degree of sensory input to his skin, the nature of his on-going activities, and many other variables (Wapner et al. 1958). For example, subjects judge their heads to be smaller when heat or touch emphasizes the skin boundary than when such stimulation is absent. It has further been shown that subjects perceive their arms as longer when pointed at an open, unobstructed vista than when pointed at a limiting wall. The subject’s mood, his attitudes toward himself, his degree of psychiatric disturbance, and a number of other psychological factors have been found to play a part in his evaluation of his own body size. For example, persons exposed to an experience of failure see themselves as shorter than they do under conditions of nonfailure. Schizophrenic, as compared to normal, subjects unrealistically exaggerate the size of their bodies. Normal subjects who ingest psychotomimetic drugs, which produce psychoticlike disturbance, likewise overestimate the sizes of their body parts. At another level, it has been noted that the relative sizes an individual ascribes to regions of his body (for example, right side versus left side, back versus front) may reflect aspects of his personality organization.

Aside from the formal research efforts that have highlighted the importance of perceived body size as a body image variable, there is a long history of anecdotal and clinical observation supporting a similar view. Vivid experiences of change in body size have been described in schizophrenic and brain-damaged patients, in patients with migraine attacks, and in various other persons exposed to severe stress demands. Clearly, there is a tendency for experiences to be translated into changes in perceived body size.

Projective techniques. Responses to ambiguous stimuli, such as ink blots, briefly exposed pictures, and incomplete representations of the human form, have been widely utilized to measure body attitudes. It is assumed that when a person is asked to interpret or give meaning to something as vague as an ink blot, he projects self-feelings and self-representations into his interpretations. In this vein, it has been found that persons with localized body defects focus their attention upon corresponding body areas when studying pictures containing vague representations of the human figure. The frequency of references to body sensations (such as pain, hunger, fatigue) in stories composed in response to pictures has been shown by D. J. van Lennep (1957) to vary developmentally and to differ between the sexes. Females were found to show a moderate increase in body references beyond the age of 15, whereas males were typified by a pattern of decline in such references. It has been suggested by van Lennep that in Western culture men are supposed to transcend their bodies and to turn their energies toward the world. Women, on the other hand, are given approval for continuing and even increasing their investments in their bodies.

Fisher and Cleveland (1958) have developed a method for scoring responses to ink blots which measures how clearly the individual is able to experience his body as possessing boundaries that differentiate it from its environs. This boundary measure has been able to predict several noteworthy aspects of behavior, including the desire for high achievement, behavior in small groups, the locus of psychosomatic symptomatology, and adequacy of adjustment to body disablement.

Perspectives and problems. The investigation of body image phenomena has become a vigorous enterprise. One dominant fact that has emerged is that the individual’s body is a unique perceptual object. The individual responds to his own body with an intensity of ego involvement that can rarely be evoked by other objects. The body is, after all, in a unique position as the only object that is simultaneously perceived and a part of the perceiver. In studying an individual’s manner of experiencing and conceptualizing his body, one obtains rich data about him that is not readily available from other sources.

It is difficult to know what priorities to assign to the body image issues that still need to be clarified. Speaking broadly, one may say there is an emphatic need to ascertain the principal axes underlying the organization of the body image. It remains to be established whether the body image is built around the spatial dimensions of the body, the specialized functions of different body regions, or perhaps the private and symbolic meanings assigned to body areas by the culture. There is also a need to examine the relationships between body attitudes and socialization modes in different cultures. There is evidence in the anthropological literature that body attitudes may differ radically in relation to cultural context. Another important problem for research is the assessment of the role that body image plays in the development and definition of the individual’s sense of identity.

Taken from:  http://www.simplypsychology.org/psychoanalysis.html for academic purposes.

Pregunta Verdadero-Falso

Answer the following questions about the  "Body Image" text. according to the text decide if the sentences are True  V or False F.

Pregunta 1

The concept of body image or body concept: It is the way how the individual perceives his own body.

Pregunta 2

Henry Head was the first author to talk about the Phantom limb.

Pregunta 3

The concept of someone’s body is represented only by a conscious image.

Pregunta 4

Experiments in the area of body image are relatively new, most scientific studies having been carried out since 1949.

Pregunta 5

Schilder suggested that the body image is molded by one’s interactions with others.

Pregunta 6

Freud considered not important the body concept to the development of identity and ego structure.

Pregunta 7

It has been found that men are most likely to be dissatisfied with areas of their bodies that seem “too large”; while women focus their self-criticism upon body sectors that appear to be “too small”. 

Pregunta 8

Freud’s theory of libidinal development was saturated with key references to body attitudes; conceptualized the individual’s psychosexual development in terms of the successive localization of energy and sensitivity at oral, anal, and genital body sites.

Pregunta 9

The phrase “The investigation of body image phenomena has become a vigorous enterprise” means that now body image research is not important as it was 10 years ago. 

Pregunta 10

Body image concepts are important for an understanding of such diverse phenomena as adjustment to body disablement, maintenance of posture and spatial orientation, personality development, and cultural differences.