ABSTRACT
To the members of all societies, the human body is more than just a physical organism fluctuating between health and illness. It is also the focus of a set of beliefs about its social and psychological significance, its structure and its function. The term body image has been used to describe all the ways that an individual conceptualizes and experiences his or her body, whether consciously or not. In Fisher’s1 definition, this includes ‘his collective attitudes, feelings and fantasies about his body’, as well as ‘the manner in which a person has learnt to organize and integrate his body experiences’. The culture and background in which we grow up teaches us how to perceive and interpret the many changes that can occur over time in our own bodies and in the bodies of other people. We learn how to differentiate a young body from an aged one, a sick body from a healthy one, a fit body from a disabled one; how to define a fever or a pain, a feeling of clumsiness or of anxiety; how to perceive some parts of the body as public, and others as private; and how to view some bodily functions as socially acceptable and others as morally unclean.
