This paper examines the relationship between inherent oral traits (neoteny), cultural bias towards orality and consumerist culture. Through exploring the evolution of Mickey Mouse and looking at the consensual ideal body, I shall offer that consumerism and politics are shaping our body to remain needy, unsatisfied and pathologically oral. The paper suggests that psychotherapy, inasmuch as it challenges such pathological positions, is political and counter-cultural. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Key words: consumerism; politics; orality; neoteny; gender The world of human behaviour is too complex and multifarious to be unlocked by any simple key. I say this to maintain that this richness -if anything -is both our hope and our essence. (Stephen Jay Gould, 1978, p. 533) Psychoanalyst and body psychotherapist John Conger (1994, 2005) claimed that Western civilisation turned the body into the shadow: the part of us that held whichever sides we did not find worthy of owning up to. The body held a paradox: on the one hand, it was covered and layered, painted and camouflaged; on the other, it was our body that was first seen. We modestly (or shamefully) concealed it, yet it was visible to all, publicly expressing our personal (and possibly our social) unconscious processes.Whatever fears, cultural and social attitudes, aspirations, and values and beliefs we hold, these all find their expression in the body. Culture creates the body and, in return, the body conceptualises the culture and embodies it (Appel-Opper, 2010). Thus the body has its own politics and, faced with the speeches of our persona, the body tells the stories of our unspeakable shadow: our pains, our unrealised wishes, our jealousy, passion, and neediness which sometimes are too painful even to be spoken of.It is no surprise that from the dawn of history many attempts were made to silence the body, and since men were in power for the majority of time, the woman's body was silenced even more extensively than man's (Butler, 1988;Cixous & Clement, 1986;Irigaray, 1993 tried to narrow down the body's dialogue, to hide its inconvenient transparency, its visible passion and fear, hate, and desire for connection which are easily seen by those willing to look. Such political attempts at silencing were expressed in gendered power struggles (chauvinism throughout the years), by religious institutions and by other societal and familial organisations. This paper is dedicated to the exploration and demonstration of the dialectical relationship between body and politics, through body-reading of cultural icons, some clinical vignettes and cultural examples. I would claim that the politics of the body has been at the centre of the psychotherapeutic practice since the very early days of psychoanalysis and that psychotherapeutic acts represent political choices, which are publicly announced by the bodies that we are.
BARBIE COMES TO THERAPYMiri sought psychotherapy following some anxiety attacks and unexplained chest pain. She was 25, beautiful and hi...