ABSTRACT

In order to understand more fully how each individual woman comes to feel from the inside that she must respond to the call of the diet/fashion/body beautiful industries, peoples need to comprehend how body insecurity works at an intra-psychic level. In providing a framework to consider this, this chapter draws upon clinical and theoretical work in psychoanalysis as it provides readers with the fine-grained texture if they are to understand the steps involved in the acquisition of a corporeal sense of self. The notion of the self becoming a subject and realizing the physical boundaries of subjectivity is a knotty problem in developmental theory, for that very recognition itself implies a split between the psyche and the soma. Further, the chapter shows that the mother-daughter relationship, the critical relationship in the forming of a girl's psychology, is shaped by cultural forces and intra-psychic laws that frequently preclude the mother's consistent and unambivalent relating to the needs of a girl infant.