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French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Professor Gerard Le Gue is convinced: “There are no beautiful mouths or noses – only the facial expression as a whole can be beautiful.” This also applies to other parts of the body – chest, legs, hips, waist – and is fully consistent with the opinion of psychologists: before trying to change any element of your appearance, you need to figure out what exactly it represents.
The French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Professor Gerard Le Gue sees in the requests of patients to remove excess fat at the waist, correct sagging or simply too large breasts, rid them of wrinkles on their faces or make their nose too large graceful, not just an insistent desire to regain youth and beauty, but something more.
“The desire to change one’s own body is always dictated by rather complex psychological motives, and it is very important to clarify them before the appearance undergoes significant and often irreversible transformations,” he warns.
Gerard le Guet knows what he’s talking about: in his twenty years of collaboration with Maurice Mimoun, head of plastic surgery at the Rothschild Hospital in Paris, he has worked with more than 900 patients, both men and women, exploring their hidden motives and unconscious desires. Of course, each case is unique, but the psychoanalyst was able to identify a connection between the characteristics of certain parts of the body and the personality.
Nose
“The nose represents the masculine principle,” explains Gerard le Guet. Most of the women who want to change his form are unhappy with their relationship with their father. Their desire to soften their profile testifies to an unconscious desire to break the connection with their father and assert their own femininity.
The nose often serves as a kind of indicator of family secrets. For example, a patient seeking to make her large humpbacked nose shorter, tries, without realizing it, to erase from her family history the “mistake” of one of her ancestors who introduced Caucasian blood into her.
And a young man, dissatisfied with the shape of his nose, eventually finds out that he really was adopted in infancy and that it was the unusual – not the same as that of his parents – the shape of his own nose that bothered him for many years, making him painfully wonder if they were adopted. he.
Chest
On the contrary, the breast and the problems associated with it most often refer to the image of the mother. “A mother who readily accompanies her daughter to a consultation with a surgeon about breast plastic surgery, as a rule, herself suffered from problems associated with her appearance in her youth,” notes Gerard le Gouet.
And the daughter, to whom the “unsuccessful” shape or size of the breast seems to be an insurmountable obstacle in relations with men, unconsciously blames the mother for this shortcoming, making her responsible for her own imperfection and insufficient sexual attractiveness.
“Women who don’t like their breasts often say they don’t perceive them as an erogenous zone,” adds Gerard Le Guet. “However, before they decide to have an operation, they need to distance themselves from their mother to the right extent. Otherwise, the results of the operation may disappoint them, which often leads to depression – sometimes very severe.
Mouth
His “alteration” is usually performed as part of a general correction of facial contours. The fashion for defiantly plump lips (“duck beak”) has recently come to naught – most of the patients who turn to plastic surgeons ask only to slightly increase the volume of the lips, to give them a softer feminine shape.
“This is due to the fact that pursed lips are often associated with sternness, and therefore do not go well with the gentle image that many women try to create,” explains Gerard le Gouet. – In addition, by changing the shape of the lips, many women are trying thereby to enhance their sexuality, to make their mouth more attractive, desirable for a kiss. Lips are unconsciously associated with large labia, and therefore the desire to remake them is also a desire to increase the quality of sexual pleasure in general.
Whatever part of the body is discussed, the professor is convinced: “The aesthetic approach to human appearance is connected with our unconscious and directly correlates with the categories of “good-bad”, which are laid down in the psyche from childhood.” In other words, we consider ourselves ugly only when we are unable to recognize ourselves as good enough. And the surgeon’s scalpel alone cannot make us better in our own eyes.
Add or take away
According to leading plastic surgeons, the demand for the services of their industry in our country is steadily growing. This is evidenced by a survey conducted by the professional publication “Beautytime – news in the world of cosmetics” especially for Psychologies magazine. Plastic surgery is used along with the services of fitness clubs and beauty salons. This is connected with the cult of youth and beauty, which involves both the elite of society and the middle class.
In quantitative terms, breast augmentation and liposuction (abdomen, riding breeches on the hips, buttocks, knees, ankles, waist, pubis) share the first place. They are followed by the correction of the face as a whole, and the third place in popularity is occupied by local operations on the face and head: changing the shape of the ears, nose, eyebrows, etc.
The majority of patients (90%) rate the results of operations as satisfactory, a few as excellent or unsatisfactory. Less than 1% of patients make a negative assessment. In most cases, having received a good result, people think about further changes. As a rule, with repeated operations, the patient turns to the same surgeon.