Category: Mental Health

What is Mental Health Denial?

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Introduction

Mental illness denial or mental disorder denial is a form of denialism in which a person denies the existence of mental disorders.

Both serious analysts, as well as pseudoscientific movements question the existence of certain disorders.

A minority of professional researchers see disorders such as depression from a sociocultural perspective and argue that the solution to it is fixing a dysfunction in the society not in the person’s brain.

Certain analysts argue this denialism is usually fuelled by narcissistic injury. Anti-psychiatry movements such as Scientology promote mental illness denial by having alternative practices to psychiatry.

Views

Views of Thomas Szasz

According to Thomas Szasz there is no such thing as mental illness. He views psychiatry as a mechanism for political oppression. Szasz wrote a book on the subject in 1961, which is called The Myth of Mental Illness. There are also “Szasz followers”, people who agree with ideas of Thomas Szasz.

Views of Elyn Saks

Probing patient’s denial may lead to better ways to help them overcome their denial and provide insight into other issues. Major reasons for denial are narcissistic injury and denialism. In denialism, a person tries to deny psychologically uncomfortable truth and tries to rationalise it. This urge for denialism is fuelled further by narcissistic injury. Narcissism gets injured when a person feels vulnerable (or weak or overwhelmed) for some reason like mental illness.

Denialism in India

Mental illness denial in Republic of India is a common problem. Many Indians view mental illnesses as, quote: “touchy-feely, new-age hogwash”, even though 1 in every 10 Indians have a mental health condition in India.

Athletes

Studies show that Overtrained (OT) athletes suffer from Major Depressive Disorder but many athletic trainers and psychologists deny this and as a result athletes are not getting proper medical treatment. Patients deny existence of depression and blame themselves for their inadequacies and try to overcome their inadequacies which can make the symptoms more severe. Their denial also acts as an obstacle for biopsychological approach towards OT.

TV Series

In the animated TV series South Park, in the episode titled City Sushi there is a scene where Butters Stotch is wondering whether Dr. William Janus is having an incident of his multiple personality disorder, to which Dr. William Janus replies: “Come on, you think multiple personality disorder is real? I’ve been using that to scam this town for seven years.”

What is Denialism?

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Introduction

In the psychology of human behaviour, denialism is a person’s choice to deny reality as a way to avoid a psychologically uncomfortable truth.

Denialism is an essentially irrational action that withholds the validation of a historical experience or event, when a person refuses to accept an empirically verifiable reality.

In the sciences, denialism is the rejection of basic facts and concepts that are undisputed, well-supported parts of the scientific consensus on a subject, in favour of ideas that are radical, controversial, or fabricated. The terms Holocaust denial and AIDS denialism describe the denial of the facts and the reality of the subject matters, and the term climate change denial describes denial of the scientific consensus that the climate change of planet Earth is a real and occurring event primarily caused in geologically recent times by human activity. The forms of denialism present the common feature of the person rejecting overwhelming evidence and trying to generate political controversy in attempts to deny the existence of consensus.

The motivations and causes of denialism include religion, self-interest (economic, political, or financial), and defence mechanisms meant to protect the psyche of the denialist against mentally disturbing facts and ideas; such disturbance is called cognitive dissonance in psychology terms.

Definition and Tactics

Anthropologist Didier Fassin distinguishes between denial, defined as “the empirical observation that reality and truth are being denied”, and denialism, which he defines as “an ideological position whereby one systematically reacts by refusing reality and truth”. Persons and social groups who reject propositions on which there exists a mainstream and scientific consensus engage in denialism when they use rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument and legitimate debate, when there is none. It is a process that operates by employing one or more of the following five tactics in order to maintain the appearance of legitimate controversy:

  • Conspiracy theories: Dismissing the data or observation by suggesting opponents are involved in “a conspiracy to suppress the truth”.
  • Cherry picking: Selecting an anomalous critical paper supporting their idea, or using outdated, flawed, and discredited papers in order to make their opponents look as though they base their ideas on weak research. Diethelm and McKee (2009) note, “Denialists are usually not deterred by the extreme isolation of their theories, but rather see it as an indication of their intellectual courage against the dominant orthodoxy and the accompanying political correctness.”
  • False experts: Paying an expert in the field, or another field, to lend supporting evidence or credibility. This goes hand-in-hand with the marginalization of real experts and researchers.
  • Moving the goalposts: Dismissing evidence presented in response to a specific claim by continually demanding some other (often unfulfillable) piece of evidence (aka Shifting baseline).
  • Other logical fallacies: Usually one or more of false analogy, appeal to consequences, straw man, or red herring.

Common tactics to different types of denialism include misrepresenting evidence, false equivalence, half-truths, and outright fabrication. South African judge Edwin Cameron notes that a common tactic used by denialists is to “make great play of the inescapable indeterminacy of figures and statistics”. Historian Taner Akçam states that denialism is commonly believed to be negation of facts, but in fact “it is in that nebulous territory between facts and truth where such denialism germinates. Denialism marshals its own facts and it has its own truth.”

Focusing on the rhetorical tactics through which denialism is achieved in language, Alex Gillespie (2020) of the London School of Economics has reviewed the linguistic and practical defensive tactics for denying disruptive information. These tactics are conceptualised in terms of three layers of defence:

  • Avoiding: The first line of defence against disruptive information is to avoid it.
  • Delegitimising: The second line of defence is to attack the messenger, by undermining the credibility of the source.
  • Limiting: The final line of defence, if disruptive information cannot be avoided or delegitimised, is to rationalise and limit the impact of the disruptive ideas.

In 2009 author Michael Specter defined group denialism as “when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie”.

Prescriptive and Polemic Perspectives

If one party to a debate accuses the other of denialism they are framing the debate. This is because an accusation of denialism is both prescriptive and polemic: prescriptive because it carries implications that there is truth to the denied claim; polemic since the accuser implies that continued denial in the light of presented evidence raises questions about the other’s motives. Edward Skidelsky, a lecturer in philosophy at Exeter University writes that “An accusation of ‘denial’ is serious, suggesting either deliberate dishonesty or self-deception. The thing being denied is, by implication, so obviously true that the denier must be driven by perversity, malice or wilful blindness.” He suggests that, by the introduction of the word denier into further areas of historical and scientific debate, “One of the great achievements of The Enlightenment—the liberation of historical and scientific enquiry from dogma—is quietly being reversed”.

Some people have suggested that because denial of the Holocaust is well known, advocates who use the term denialist in other areas of debate may intentionally or unintentionally imply that their opponents are little better than Holocaust deniers. However, Robert Gallo and colleagues defended this latter comparison, stating that AIDS denialism is similar to Holocaust denial since it is a form of pseudoscience that “contradicts an immense body of research”.

Current Examples

HIV/AIDS

AIDS denialism is the denial that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is the cause of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). AIDS denialism has been described as being “among the most vocal anti-science denial movements”. Some denialists reject the existence of HIV, while others accept that the virus exists but say that it is a harmless passenger virus and not the cause of AIDS. Insofar as denialists acknowledge AIDS as a real disease, they attribute it to some combination of recreational drug use, malnutrition, poor sanitation, and side effects of antiretroviral medication, rather than infection with HIV. However, the evidence that HIV causes AIDS is scientifically conclusive and the scientific community rejects and ignores AIDS-denialist claims as based on faulty reasoning, cherry picking, and misrepresentation of mainly outdated scientific data. With the rejection of these arguments by the scientific community, AIDS-denialist material is now spread mainly through the Internet.

Thabo Mbeki, former president of South Africa, embraced AIDS denialism, proclaiming that AIDS was primarily caused by poverty. About 365,000 people died from AIDS during his presidency; it is estimated that around 343,000 premature deaths could have been prevented if proper treatment had been available.

Climate Change

Some international corporations, such as ExxonMobil, have contributed to “fake citizens’ groups and bogus scientific bodies” that claim that the science of global warming is inconclusive, according to a criticism by George Monbiot. ExxonMobil did not deny making the financial contributions, but its spokesman stated that the company’s financial support for scientific reports did not mean it influenced the outcome of those studies. Newsweek and Mother Jones have published articles stating corporations are funding the “denial industry”.

In the context of consumer protection, denialism has been defined as “the use of rhetorical techniques and predictable tactics to erect barriers to debate and consideration of any type of reform, regardless of the facts.” The Bush Administration’s replacement of previous science advisers with industry experts or scientists tied to industry, and its refusal to submit the Kyoto Protocol for ratification due to uncertainties they asserted were present in the climate change issue, have been cited by the press as examples of politically motivated denialism.

COVID-19

The term “COVID-19 denialism” or merely “COVID denialism” refers to the thinking of those who deny the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic. or, at the very least, deny that deaths are happening in the manner or proportions scientifically recognised by the World Health Organisation. The claims that the COVID-19 pandemic has been faked, exaggerated, or mischaracterised are pseudoscience. Some famous people who have engaged in COVID-19 denialism include Elon Musk, President Donald Trump, and Brazilian President Bolsonaro.

Evolution

Religious beliefs may prompt an individual to deny the validity of the scientific theory of evolution. Evolution is considered an undisputed fact within the scientific community and in academia, where the level of support for evolution is essentially universal, yet this view is often met with opposition by biblical literalists. The alternative view is often presented as a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis’s creation myth. Many fundamentalist Christians teach creationism as if it were fact under the banners of creation science and intelligent design. Beliefs that typically coincide with creationism include the belief in the global flood myth, geocentrism, and the belief that the Earth is only 6,000-10,000 years old. These beliefs are viewed as pseudoscience in the scientific community and are widely regarded as erroneous.

Flat Earth

The superseded belief that the Earth is flat, and denial of all of the overwhelming evidence that supports an approximately spherical Earth that rotates around its axis and orbits the Sun, persists into the 21st century. Modern proponents of flat-Earth cosmology (or flat-Earthers) refuse to accept any kind of contrary evidence, dismissing all spaceflights and images from space as hoaxes and accusing all organizations and even private citizens of conspiring to “hide the truth”. They also claim that no actual satellites are orbiting the Earth, that the International Space Station is fake, and that these are lies from all governments involved in this grand cover-up.

Adherents of the modern flat-Earth model propose that a dome-shaped firmament encloses a disk-shaped Earth. They may also claim, after Samuel Rowbotham, that the Sun is only 3,000 miles above the Earth and that the Moon and the Sun orbit above the Earth rather than around it. Modern flat-Earthers believe that Antarctica is not a continent but a massive ice flow, with a wall 150 feet or higher, which circles the perimeter of the Earth and keeps everything (including all the oceans’ water) from falling off the edge.

Flat-Earthers also assert that no one is allowed to fly over or explore Antarctica, despite contrary evidence. According to them, all photos and videos of ships sinking under the horizon and of the bottoms of city skylines and clouds below the horizon, revealing the curvature of the Earth, have been manipulated, computer-generated, or somehow faked. Therefore, regardless of any scientific or empirical evidence provided, flat-Earthers conclude that it is fabricated or altered in some way.

When linked to other observed phenomena such as gravity, sunsets, tides, eclipses, distances and other measurements that challenge the flat earth model, claimants replace commonly-accepted explanations with piecemeal models that distort or over-simplify how perspective, mass, buoyancy, light or other physical systems work. These piecemeal replacements rarely conform with each other, finally leaving many flat-Earth claimants to agree that such phenomena remain “mysteries” and more investigation is to be done. In this conclusion, adherents remain open to all explanations except the commonly accepted globular Earth model, shifting the debate from ignorance to denialism.

Genetically Modified Foods

There is a scientific consensus that currently available food derived from GM crops poses no greater risk to human health than conventional food, but that each GM food needs to be tested on a case-by-case basis before introduction. Nonetheless, members of the public are much less likely than scientists to perceive GM foods as safe. The legal and regulatory status of GM foods varies by country, with some nations banning or restricting them, and others permitting them with widely differing degrees of regulation.

However, opponents have objected to GM foods on grounds including safety. Psychological analyses indicate that over 70% of GM food opponents in the US are “absolute” in their opposition, experience disgust at the thought of eating GM foods, and are “evidence insensitive”.

Statins

Statin denialism is a rejection of the medical worth of statins. Cardiologist Steven Nissen at Cleveland Clinic has commented “We are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of our patients to Web sites…” promoting unproven medical therapies. Harriet Hall sees a spectrum of “statin denialism” ranging from pseudoscientific claims to the understatement of benefits and overstatement of side effects, all of which is contrary to the scientific evidence.

Mental Illness Denial

Refer to Mental Illness Denial.

Mental illness denial or mental disorder denial where a person denies the existence of mental disorders. Both serious analysts, as well as pseudoscientific movements question the existence of certain disorders. A minority of professional researchers see disorders such as depression from a sociocultural perspective and argue that the solution to it is fixing a dysfunction in the society not in the person’s brain. Certain analysts argue this denialism is usually fuelled by narcissistic injury. Anti-psychiatry movements such as Scientology promote mental illness denial by having alternative practices to psychiatry.

Historical Examples

Historical negationism, also called denialism, is falsification or distortion of the historical record. It should not be conflated with historical revisionism, a broader term that extends to newly evidenced, fairly reasoned academic reinterpretations of history. In attempting to revise the past, illegitimate historical revisionism may use techniques inadmissible in proper historical discourse, such as presenting known forged documents as genuine, inventing ingenious but implausible reasons for distrusting genuine documents, attributing conclusions to books and sources that report the opposite, manipulating statistical series to support the given point of view, and deliberately mistranslating texts.

Some countries, such as Germany, have criminalized the negationist revision of certain historical events, while others take a more cautious position for various reasons, such as protection of free speech; others mandate negationist views, such as California and Japan, where schoolchildren are explicitly prevented from learning about the California genocide and Japanese war crimes, respectively. Notable examples of negationism include Holocaust denial, Armenian genocide denial, the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, Japanese history textbook controversies, and historiography in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. Some notable historical negationists include Arthur Butz, David Irving, and Shinzo Abe. In literature, the consequences of historical negationism have been imaginatively depicted in some works of fiction, such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. In modern times, negationism may spread via new media, such as the Internet.

Armenian Genocide Denialism

Armenian genocide denial is the claim that the Ottoman Empire and its ruling party, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), did not commit genocide against its Armenian citizens during World War I – a crime documented in a large body of evidence and affirmed by the vast majority of scholars. The perpetrators denied the genocide as they carried it out, claiming Armenians were resettled for military reasons, not exterminated. In the genocide’s aftermath, incriminating documents were systematically destroyed, and denial has been the policy of every government of the Republic of Turkey, as of 2022.

Borrowing the arguments used by the CUP to justify its actions, denial rests on the assumption that the “relocation” of Armenians was a legitimate state action in response to a real or perceived Armenian uprising that threatened the existence of the empire during wartime. Deniers assert the CUP intended to resettle Armenians rather than kill them. They claim the death toll is exaggerated or attribute the deaths to other factors, such as a purported civil war, disease, bad weather, rogue local officials, or bands of Kurds and outlaws. Historian Ronald Grigor Suny states that the main argument is “There was no genocide, and the Armenians were to blame for it.” Denial is usually accompanied by “rhetoric of Armenian treachery, aggression, criminality, and territorial ambition.”

One of the most important reasons for this denial is that the genocide enabled the establishment of a Turkish nation-state. Recognition would contradict Turkey’s founding myths. Since the 1920s, Turkey has worked to prevent official recognition or even mention of the genocide in other countries; these efforts have included millions of dollars spent on lobbying, the creation of research institutes, and intimidation and threats. Denial also affects Turkey’s domestic policies and is taught in Turkish schools; some Turkish citizens who acknowledge the genocide have faced prosecution for “insulting Turkishness”. The century-long effort by the Turkish state to deny the genocide sets it apart from other cases of genocide in history. Azerbaijan also denies the genocide and campaigns against its recognition internationally. Most Turkish citizens and political parties in Turkey support the state’s denial policy. The denial of the genocide contributes to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict as well as ongoing violence against Kurds in Turkey.

Holocaust Denial

Holocaust denial refers to denial of the murder of 5 to 6 million Jews by the Nazis in Europe during World War 2. It is an essentially irrational action that withholds validation of a historical experience or event.” In this context, the term is a subset of the more accurate genocide denial, which is a form of politically motivated denialism.

Srebrenica Massacre Denialism

Sonja Biserko, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, and Edina Bečirević, the Faculty of Criminalistics, Criminology and Security Studies of the University of Sarajevo have pointed to a culture of denial of the Srebrenica massacre in Serbian society, taking many forms and present in particular in political discourse, the media, the law and the educational system.

What is Demand (Psychoanalysis)?

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Introduction

In the theory of Jacques Lacan, demand (French: demande) represents the way instinctive needs are inevitably alienated through the effects of language on the human condition.

The concept of demand was developed by Lacan in parallel to those of need and desire to account for the role of speech on human aspirations. Demand forms part of Lacan’s battle against the approach to language acquisition favoured by ego psychology, and makes use of Kojeve’s theory of desire. Demand is not a Freudian concept.

Language Acquisition

For Lacan, demand is the result of language acquisition on physical needs – the individual’s wants are automatically filtered through the alien system of external signifiers.

Where traditionally psychoanalysis had recognised that learning to speak was a major step in the ego’s acquisition of power over the world, and celebrated its capacity for increasing instinctual control, Lacan by contrast stressed the more sinister side of man’s early submergence in language.

He argued that “demand constitutes the Other as already possessing the ‘privilege’ of satisfying needs”, and that indeed the child’s biological needs are themselves altered by “the condition that is imposed on him by the existence of the discourse, to make his need pass through the defiles of the signifier”. Thus even in speaking one’s demands, the latter are altered; and even when they are met, the child finds that it no longer wants what it thought it wanted.

Desire

In Lacanian thought, a demand results when a lack in the Real is transformed into the Symbolic medium of language. Demands faithfully express unconscious signifying formations, but always leave behind a residue or kernel of desire, representing a lost surplus of jouissance for the subject, (because the Real is never totally symbolisable).

As a result, for Lacan, “desire is situated in dependence on demand – which, by being articulated in signifiers, leaves a metonymic remainder which runs under it”. The frustration inherent in demand – whatever is actually asked for is ‘not it’ – is what gives rise to desire.

The Other’s Demands

The demands of human society are initially mediated via the Mother; with the discourse of whom the infant comes to identify, subsuming its own non-verbal self-expression.

The result in the neurotic may be a dominance of parental demand, and of the social objects valued by such demands – jobs, degrees, marriage, success, money and the like. Lacan considered indeed that for the neurotic “the demand of the Other assumes the function of an object in his phantasy…this prevalence given by the neurotic to demand”.

Transference

Lacan considered that the transference appears in the forms of demands from the patient – demands which he stressed the analyst must resist.

Through such demands, he states, “the whole past opens up right down to early infancy. The subject has never done anything other than demand, he could not have survived otherwise, and…regression shows nothing other than a return to the present of signifiers used in demands”.

François Roustang however has challenged the Lacanian view, arguing that the patient’s demand, rather than undermining the analysis, may be a positive attempt to get the analyst to shift their therapeutic stance.

On This Day … 01 March

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Events

  • Zero Discrimination Day.
  • Self-injury Awareness Day (international).

Zero Discrimination Day

Zero Discrimination Day is an annual day celebrated on 01 March each year by the United Nations (UN) and other international organisations. The day aims to promote equality before the law and in practice throughout all of the member countries of the UN. The day was first celebrated on 01 March 2014, and was launched by UNAIDS Executive Director Michel Sidibé on 27 February of that year with a major event in Beijing.

In February 2017, UNAIDS called on people to “make some noise around zero discrimination, to speak up and prevent discrimination from standing in the way of achieving ambitions, goals and dreams.”

The day is particularly noted by organisations like UNAIDS that combat discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS. “HIV related stigma and discrimination is pervasive and exists in almost every part of the world including our Liberia”, according to Dr. Ivan F. Camanor, Chairman of the National AIDS Commission of Liberia. The UN Development Programme also paid tribute in 2017 to LGBTI people with HIV/AIDS who face discrimination.

Campaigners in India have used this day to speak out against laws making discrimination against the LGBTI community more likely, especially during the previous campaign to repeal the law (Indian Penal Code, s377) that used to criminalise homosexuality in that country, before that law was overturned by the Indian Supreme Court in September 2018.

In 2015, Armenian Americans in California held a ‘die-in’ on Zero Discrimination Day to remember the victims of the Armenian genocide.

Self-Injury Awareness Day

Self-injury Awareness Day (SIAD) (also known as Self-Harm Awareness Day) is a grassroots annual global awareness event / campaign on 01 March, where on this day, and in the weeks leading up to it and after, some people choose to be more open about their own self-harm, and awareness organisations make special efforts to raise awareness about self-harm and self-injury. Some people wear an orange awareness ribbon, write “LOVE” on their arms, draw a butterfly on their wrists in awareness of “the Butterfly Project” wristband or beaded bracelet to encourage awareness of self-harm. The goal of the people who observe SIAD is to break down the common stereotypes surrounding self-harm and to educate medical professionals about the condition.

What is Anticathexis?

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Introduction

In psychoanalysis, anticathexis, or countercathexis, is the energy used by the ego to bind the primitive impulses of the Id. Sometimes the ego follows the instructions of the superego in doing so; sometimes however it develops a double-countercathexis, so as to block feelings of guilt and anxiety deriving from the superego, as well as id impulses.

Refer to Cathexis, Acathexis, Decathexis, and Body Cathexis.

Repression and Isolation

Freud saw the establishment of a permanent anticathexis as a prerequisite for successful psychological repression. He also saw countercathexis as playing a central role in isolation.

In a late work, Freud further distinguished between the external anticathexis of repression and what he called “internal anticathexis” (i.e. alteration of the ego through reaction formation).

Figure-Ground

Anticathexis has also been linked to the phenomenon of figure-ground, in that it may entail the suppression of the margin or ground of a perceptual field.

What is Body Cathexis?

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Introduction

Body cathexis is defined as the degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction one feels towards various parts and aspects of their own body.

This evaluative dimension of body image is dependent on a person’s investment of mental and emotional energy in body size, parts, shape, processes, and functions, and is integral to one’s sense of self-concept. First recognised by Jourard and Secord, body cathexis is assessed by examining correlations between measures of self-concept or esteem and bodily attitudes. An individual’s evaluation of their own body tends to drive various behaviours, including clothing choices and weight management, and the existence of a universal ideal for certain dimensions of body type is, in many cases, a source of anxiety and insecurity.

While the body has been studied by psychologists from numerous different viewpoints, few recent reports of systematic empirical research into feelings about the body exist. However, body cathexis is of crucial importance to understanding personality, since feelings about the body closely correspond to feelings about the self and produce marked behavioural consequences. Due to the substantial amount of attention individuals devote to the grooming and concern for bodily appearance, body cathexis is believed to be intrinsically related to the self-concept, with high self-esteem and self-acceptance serving as preventive factors against body dissatisfaction.

Among females in particular, one’s general attitude about the body is a significant personality variable with mental health implications. Recent studies have examined the effects of bodily attitudes on consumer dissatisfaction or satisfaction with fit of apparel, disordered eating, and participation in weight loss programmes.

Refer to Cathexis, Acathexis, Decathexis, and Anticathexis.

Body Cathexis Scale

First introduced by Secord and Jourard in 1953, the Body Cathexis Scale provides an objective measure of one’s feelings towards various aspects of their body. Originally composed of 46 items, the questionnaire asks individuals to indicate the strength and direction of feeling he or she has about certain bodily parts and functions according to a five-point Likert scale ranging from 1, “strongly negative,” to 5, “strongly positive.”

The body cathexis items used in the scale include body characteristics such as “width of shoulders,” “facial complexion,” and “body build.” Individuals are to consider each of the items listed and assign a numerical score that best represents their feelings about the various body aspects. Total body cathexis (BC) is obtained by summing the ratings for each of the 46 characteristics and dividing by total number of items.

Body Image and the Self

Body image is one of the most significant components of an individual’s self-concept. One’s perception of their body and the feelings associated with this perceived image greatly influence overall satisfaction with the self and can predict levels of self-esteem. The relationship between body image and the self-concept has been investigated extensively by Secord and Jourard, and as their research indicates, self-esteem scores and personal identification are highly correlated with body cathexis, acceptance, and overall satisfaction with physical body traits and functions.

Among the few empirical studies relevant to the relatedness of the body and the self is that of Schilder, who procured evidence – through a series of self-report questionnaires – suggesting that negative feelings, associations, and memories about the body can probe higher levels of dissatisfaction with the self. In approaching the problem of body cathexis appraisal, Secord and Jourard adapted Shilder’s methods to test their hypothesis that feelings about the body are correlated with overall feelings about the self. In their study, the researchers developed a method for assessing an individual’s feelings towards their bodily features in order to ascertain whether or not the variables attained through these methods are relevant to personality theory. Using scales of body cathexis and self cathexis, the Maslow Test of Psychological Security-Insecurity, and an anxiety-related body cathexis homonym test, Secord and Jourard concluded that the body and self tend to be cathected to the same degree. Consequently, as suggested by the results of both the body cathexis and self cathexis scales (which represent attitudes about conceptual aspects of the self in correlation to the body), low body cathexis is significantly associated with anxiety, insecurity, and negative perceptions of the self.

Likewise, an individual’s perception of self-worth is a fluctuating attitude that can rise and fall with changing components of the physical self. This attitude, coined self-esteem, is an evaluative component of the psychological self that is partially dependent upon one’s satisfaction with physical appearance. As various studies indicate, changes in body composition, perceptions of physical attractiveness, and overall body condition provide inferential support for the claim that body image is related to an individual’s self-esteem and perceived worth.

Sex Differences

Because body image and body weight are a high priority in western culture, men and women alike face gender-based societal pressures to achieve an ideal body image, which in turn influences feelings about the body and preoccupation with size, shape, weight, and appearance. According to Salusso-Deonier and Schwarzkopf, gender is a salient factor in body image development, and due to sex differences in the management and enhancement of appearance, females tend to exhibit more negative cathexis responses to the body and self as compared to men.

As their study suggests, body cathexis scores among females tend to decrease as body type varies from the ideal thin, while body cathexis scores among males show similar trends when one’s perceived body is fatter or thinner than the muscular ideal. However, though previous literature demonstrates that both men and women are concerned with weight and appearance, men generally have higher body cathexis than women. Cultural scripting, particularly male socialisation that fosters exercise involvement and physical fitness, may be partially responsible for higher body cathexis scores among males, since participation in fitness activities tends to yield significant improvement in body satisfaction. Similarly, dysphoric body image experiences often mediated by specific contextual cues also promote sizable sex differences in body cathexis and the occurrence of negative body image emotions. Relative to men, women are more strongly invested in their looks and tend to report a more negative overall body image evaluation. As the findings of their study confirm, Muth and Cash suggest that the gender-differential societal and personal standards of body attractiveness place women at a higher predisposition for less favourable, more invested, and more distressing body image attitudes.

Associated Behaviours

Feelings about the body have marked behavioural consequences, and as both casual and clinical observations suggest, body cathexis and body perceptions play a significant role in garment fit satisfaction. While the physical dimensions and product design of apparel are partially responsible for consumers’ dissatisfaction with clothing fit, consumers are often quick to blame themselves and their body type when a product does not work. For females in particular, fashionable clothing is often designed to fit a specific body type; thus, when a clothing article does not fit properly, the consumer tends to blame the poor fit on their body and not the design of the apparel – a result of the individual’s low body cathexis.

Similarly, social stimuli may play a reciprocal role in anticipating behaviour, contributing to the formation of negative feelings about the body. Since consumers often rely on social information and preconceived notions of the ideal body image when shaping their self-concept, apparel fit may contribute to body cathexis and overall feelings about the self. Therefore, dissatisfaction with the fit of garments can lead to lower body cathexis and negative attitudes regarding overall appearance, body dimensions, and weight.

Along with garment fit satisfaction, research also indicates that body image attitudes and emotions may be correlated with disordered eating behaviours. Body dissatisfaction, especially negative attitudes about weight, is a significant risk factor for the development of depressive symptoms and low self-esteem, as well as unhealthy weight control strategies, such as skipping meals, fasting, crash dieting, and self-induced purging. Low body cathexis and preoccupation can contribute to the development of eating disorders among female adolescents in particular, often a result of societal pressures and expectations to achieve the ideal, thin body type.

What is Decathexis?

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Introduction

In psychoanalysis, decathexis is the withdrawal of cathexis from an idea or instinctual object.

Decathexis is the process of dis-investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea.

Refer to Cathexis, Acathexis, Body Cathexis, and Anticathexis.

Narcissism

In narcissistic neurosis, cathexis is withdrawn from external instinctual objects (or rather their unconscious representations) and turned on the ego – a process Freud highlighted in the Schreber case, and linked to the subject’s ensuing megalomania. Refer to narcissistic personality disorder.

A similar decathexis of energy has been linked to the emergence of symptoms of hypochondriasis, as well as of melancholia.

André Green saw decathexis as the product of the death drive, blanking out the possibility of thinking by a process of what he called de-objectilising.

Grief

Decathexis of the lost person in grief was seen as a regular part of the mourning process by Freud, although later analysts have argued that such decathexis was rather the result of inhibited or partial mourning, not of successful mourning.

What is Acathexis?

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Introduction

Acathexis is a psychoanalytic term for a lack of emotional response to significant memories or actual interactions, where such a response would normally be expected.

The term also refers more broadly to a general absence of normal or expected feelings.

Acathexis has been linked to anxiety, bipolar disorder and dementia, while the phenomenon also appears in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Refer to Cathexis, Decathexis, Body Cathexis, Anticathexis, and Alexithymia.

What is Cathexis?

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Introduction

In psychoanalysis, cathexis (or emotional investment) is defined as the process of allocation of mental or emotional energy to a person, object, or idea.

Refer to Acathexis, Decathexis, Body Cathexis, and Anticathexis.

Origin of Term

The Greek term cathexis (κάθεξις) was chosen by James Strachey to render the German term Besetzung in his translation of Sigmund Freud‘s complete works. Freud himself wrote of “interest (Besetzung)”, in an early letter to Ernest Jones.

Peter Gay objected that Strachey’s use of cathexis was an unnecessarily esoteric replacement for Freud’s use of Besetzung – “a word from common German speech rich in suggestive meanings, among them ‘occupation’ (by troops) and ‘charge’ (of electricity)”.

Usage

Freud defined cathexis as an allocation of libido, pointing out for example how dream thoughts were charged with different amounts of affect. A cathexis or allocation of emotional charge might be positive or negative, leading some of his followers to speak as well of a cathexis of mortido. Freud called a group of cathected ideas a complex.

Freud frequently described the functioning of psychosexual energies in quasi-physical terms, representing frustration of libidinal desires, for example, as a blockage of (cathected) energies which would eventually build up and require release in alternative ways. This release could occur, for example, by way of regression and the “re-cathecting” of former positions or fixations, or the autoerotic enjoyment (in phantasy) of former sexual objects: “object-cathexes”.

Freud used the term “anti-cathexis” or counter-charge to describe how the ego blocks such regressive efforts to discharge one’s cathexis: that is, when the ego wishes to repress such desires. Like a steam engine, the libido’s cathexis then builds up until it finds alternative outlets, which can lead to sublimation, reaction formation, or the construction of (sometimes disabling) symptoms.

M. Scott Peck distinguishes between love and cathexis, with cathexis being the initial in-love phase of a relationship, and love being the ongoing commitment of care. Cathexis to Peck, therefore, is distinguished from love by its dynamic element.

Object Relations

Freud saw the early cathexis of objects with libidinal energy as a central aspect of human development. In describing the withdrawal of cathexes which accompanied the mourning process, Freud provided his major contribution to the foundation of object relations theory.

Thinking

Freud saw thinking as an experimental process involving minimal amounts of cathexis, “in the same way as a general shifts small figures about on a map”.

In delusions, it was the hypercathexis (or over-charging) of ideas previously dismissed as odd or eccentric which he saw as causing the subsequent pathology.

Art

Eric Berne raised the possibility that child art often represented the intensity of cathexis invested in an object, rather than its objective form.

Criticism

Critics charge that the term provides a potentially misleading neurophysiological analogy, which might be applicable to the cathexis of ideas but certainly not of objects.

Further ambiguity in Freud’s usage emerges in the contrast between cathexis as a measurable load of (undifferentiated) libido, and as a qualitatively distinct type of affect – as in a “cathexis of longing”.

What is Catecholaminergic?

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Introduction

Catecholaminergic means “related to catecholamines”.

Background

The catecholamine neurotransmitters include dopamine, epinephrine (adrenaline), and norepinephrine (noradrenaline).

A catecholaminergic agent (or drug) is a chemical which functions to directly modulate the catecholamine systems in the body or brain.

Examples include adrenergics and dopaminergics.