Is it possible to live comfortably, feeling like an unattractive person, if your own appearance does not fit into the generally accepted standards of beauty? Let’s try to look at this issue from the standpoint of psychoanalysis and existential psychology.
The concepts of “beautiful” and “ugly” accompany us from early childhood. First, our parents and others talk about our appearance, then society accepts to plant its stereotypes. How to separate your own from the imposed and become free? By inviting a psychoanalyst to discuss this topic Andrey Rossokhin and existential psychologist Dmitry Leontiev, we expected that representatives of these largely polar psychotherapeutic approaches would argue, but our experts unexpectedly agreed on many things.
Psychologies: How is the feeling of self-attractiveness formed?
Andrey Rossokhin: This knowledge always comes from parents – it is they who lay the basic concept of beauty in the child, including their own. It is also important how we look at the child and how we hug him, how we communicate with him, how we see him in our fantasies in a year, five, ten years.
Dmitry Leontiev: I would say that the feeling of own attractiveness is formed in the child not only by the parents, but also by the surrounding people in general. For parents, their baby is always good, but others can serve as a more objective source of information. Many people are familiar with this situation: everyone in the family liked the child, and suddenly he comes running from the kindergarten or school in tears: “Mom, am I really ugly?”
Today’s mass culture is a visual culture based on external images, which often have nothing to do with the internal content. There are, for example, some external signs that we can easily read, but there is some inner feeling. We distinguish a person who loves himself – we first of all consider him beautiful at a deep, subconscious level.
So, if a person is lucky with early experience, he will grow up as a harmonious personality and will love himself. And the one who is less fortunate is doomed to suffer for the rest of his life?
Dmitry Leontiev: “Doomed” is too strong a word. There are different starting conditions: one is more lucky, and the other is less. This is not a final verdict at all, but only a certain initial direction of movement, a kind of rut. If we are comfortable in it, we can achieve the desired result (in this case, a harmonious perception of our own appearance) at the cost of relatively little effort. If from childhood we were inspired by a negative view of ourselves, in order to overcome it, significant internal work will be required from us. It is naive to expect absolute justice and symmetry from the world, but a person always has a choice.
Andrey Rossokhin: I think what is important here is that a track is a type of road that limits the freedom of our development, self-perception and self-relationship. Parents, of course, pass on their own values to the child, but the task of every adult is to rework parental attitudes and create their own in their place. If my parents told me that I am ugly, I need to free myself from this and form my own image of myself. At the same time, if I grew up believing that there is no one more beautiful than me, as I grow older, I may face no less problems. Opening your eyes and seeing yourself and people beyond the tearing opposition of “beautiful and ugly” means feeling attractive enough to love yourself.
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“Beauty” and “attractiveness” are almost synonymous. But there is a subtle, almost imperceptible difference between them. How would you define its essence?
Andrey Rossokhin: Beauty is
Dmitry Leontiev: I would like to add that the attitude towards beauty as such in society is changing. The key aesthetic category – largely at the suggestion of the philosopher Alexei Losev – is the concept of “expressive”. His idea is that the form expresses the true essence, shows what it really is, therefore, the more expressive the object, the more attractive it is. It is for this reason that the aesthetics of evil are sometimes so attractive. When it comes to beauty, here we run the risk of falling into the trap of social stereotypes. External beauty is a kind of formal criterion by which we can be compared with other people. But imagine how bleak this picture is: slender ranks of indistinguishable sexy machos who behave the same way because they are guided by the same stereotypes; the same women reading the same women’s magazines… Inner beauty manifests itself when a person reveals his inner essence and begins to manifest himself in accordance with what he really is.
When does beauty become important to a person?
Andrey Rossokhin: Then, when his father and mother first think about the future child, they begin to fantasize about him – from this moment, and not from the moment of birth or even conception, the formation of an attractive image of the child begins. Through the prism of this image, parents will see the born baby. This is what makes our newly born babies so beautiful!
Dmitry Leontiev: Let me disagree: I can easily imagine a person for whom his beauty will never become important, who will never face the peculiarities of his appearance as a problem. This is primarily due to self-perception: if a person loves himself, he will consider himself beautiful simply by default.
Attractiveness and inner beauty are similar things. How do they relate to the phenomenon of the “ugly but charming” person?
Andrey Rossokhin: Beauty is a kind of iceberg, and physical beauty is at the tip of it. If we are interested in this obvious, superficial layer, then when we meet a person, we react precisely to his appearance. But there are other levels of the “iceberg”, and we can discover them for ourselves: for this, it is simply necessary to get to know a person better, to take his inner world more seriously. For example, someone may find Liza Minnelli or Barbara Streisand unattractive, but this will only mean that he has not watched any of their films to the end. Plunging into the world of these beautiful actresses, we fall under their charm and see them differently. Another example is the state of love, when an aged loved one remains as beautiful as when he was in love.
Dmitry Leontiev: Certainly. External beauty is a picture, a showcase. Anyone who is interested in a person as such tries to penetrate her, to find out what is inside. And the one who is attracted primarily by the external, is content with the picture, not attaching special importance to its internal content.
How to instill a sense of beauty in children, teaching them to pay attention not only to the “picture”?
Andrey Rossokhin: Walking or looking out the window, we can show our child how different nature can be. A beautiful sunrise, a beautiful rainbow, but rain, and puddles, and mud can be beautiful. Getting used to noticing beauty in seemingly inconspicuous things, children begin to perceive nature not as something averagely attractive, but as an integral, living and complex phenomenon and learn to see their deep essence behind external images.
And what can an adult do to feel that appearance is only part of him, and become free from stereotypes?
Dmitry Leontiev: It is very important not to identify yourself with your beauty, with your body, to separate yourself and your appearance, because our “I” is not reduced to appearance and all those external attributes that many people consider to be their essence. If someone considers that the main thing in himself is that he is a successful entrepreneur, in case of ruin, he will have to experience a huge disappointment. The same is true for a person who has put his beauty at the forefront: a physical injury, a scar on his face, or just age-related changes will turn into a drama for him. You should treat your bodily defects with humor. When a person can joke about his fullness or long nose, this means that he is able to abstract from other components of his personality – important, but not exhaustive of its essence, such as ours.
Andrey Rossokhin: The difficulty of “liberation” from the dictates of appearance is that there is almost always a colossal conflict between our body and soul. Not wanting to resolve this conflict, we try to hide from it: not to think about our unattractive body and only take care of the soul or ridicule our own body, proud of our talent. The other extreme is the preoccupation with the body and the belief that only thanks to it we can solve all problems. And in order to come to harmony with your appearance, you need to build relationships between the internal and external, to work out in detail and thoughtfully the disagreements between the body and the soul. This is a serious inner work, but only in this way a personality is born.