Declinações da dismorfofobia: estudo psicanalítico da distorção da imagem corporal

Abstract

Psychic symptoms transform over time being sensitive to cultural changes and symbolic values. This study proposes the analysis of disorders typical of an age where image takes precedence over any other values: the distortions of self-image. The beauty of the body as the dominant social icon in today's world offers the individual the support and a social inscription, with which he can identify himself. In addition to the social cause, we seek to find the mental processes involved in the formation of dysmorphophobic symptoms, through case studies of individuals who have a neurotic dysmorphophobia, establishing a clinical difference regarding the outbreak, the clinical structure and their psychic economy. Using psychoanalytic theory to articulate the knots binding of Real, Imaginary and Symbolic where the dysmorphophobia manifests itself, we seek the failures in relations between the three records in order to understand how and why the body image distortion happens. The analysis of clinical cases leads to the connection between dysmorphophobia and its evolutionary aspects, its traumatic events, the demand of love, the maintenance of an impossible desire and un unattainable ideal to affirm the existence of a failure of symbolization of the body, which would return as image anxiety. Dysmorphophobic symptoms in neurosis would be a way to recover, through the Imaginary, the presence of the Symbolic Other, experienced as insufficient, inadequate, absent. Excessive investment in Imaginary results in its subsequent dismemberment, not in the expected control of the Other. This defect of symbolic action of the Other on individuals with a propensity to dysmorphophobic symptoms and the unsuccessful imaginary solution found by them to deal with the anguish would be the basis for understanding the difficulty in regulating their self-image