Hypochondriac Culture (6)

Imagine the following. There is a sudden change in your body temperature. Your heart starts to beat more quickly. You begin to sweat. You have read about the symptoms of a heart attack. You beging to think that you are having a heart attack. Your anxiety rises. The combination of fear, fantasy and a catalogue of symptoms that you have heard about through our culture pushes you closer and closer to a panic attack.

Hypochondria is rarely a personal or private expression of symptoms and behviour. It is a private pain that has its roots inside image-worlds that are packed with information. In this case, information about symptoms may produce them.

Hypochondriac Culture (5)

What happens when you eat junk food? Although most diets in the United States and Canada are based on a variety of prepared and junk foods, the reality is that people continue to eat as if their actions will produce no effect. The contrast between the fetish for health and the disregard for nutrition is one of the central paradoxes of Hypochondria.  

Part Six

Hypochondriac Culture (4)

In cultures devoted to the body, there are any number of different ways in which hypochondria manifests itself. One of the overwhelming cultural concerns of the moment is what is being described as an epidemic of obesity. The response has been an epidemic of diets, diet movements and articles in magazines and newspapers about weight, body shape and health. I am not suggesting that a population that is generally overweight is a good thing. I support healthy living and exercise and so on. The challenge is how to explain weight, the body and biology in such a way that people do not get scared and worried about their health. Fear of the consequences is only one of many possible ways in which individuals will come to grips with the challenges that they face. But, fear can overtake the process and in fact lead to a defensive or stoical response. A fatalistic attitude is not the answer, but if the odds seem too great, and the fear too strong, why attack the core of the issue? Weight is as much about overeating as it is about an inability to "see" the body, to see our own bodies.

The aesthetics of body image -- how we hold to and understand our own sense of self, will not be solved by just losing weight.

Hypochondriac Culture (3)

What if the hyponchondriac body is an aesthetic projection?

Lets for a moment assume that our daily experiences are continuously in a kind of flux between awareness and loss of awareness. We engage with the world around us without being fully aware of our intentions, often without understanding what motivates us to do certain things or react in specific ways to people and to objects.

When someone looks at us we take that look and project it onto our bodies and into our minds. This is not a mechanical process and has no particular sequence to it. Nevertheless, a particular look can lead to any number of thoughts and from those any number of different projections.

Now, lets reverse what I just said. What happens when the feelings you are expressing towards a friend for example, don't play out in the way that you anticipated? How does your body deal with the impact of that experience?

Another way of thinking about this is to reflect on the fact that our bodies represent and express our histories, both personal and public. Pain becomes an interface between the internal and external images that we have of our biological selves. Irrespective of whether that pain is real or not, our bodies express and represent our thoughts—the internal becomes visible.

If the pain is a fiction, the only way to make it real is to rescuplt the body, remake it in the light of the artifice, mark it with evidence, in other words, transform it into an aesthetic object.

Part Four

Hypochondriac Culture (2)

Hypochondria is an insidious disease because it is a silent and often invisible part of the suffering of so many people. It is centred on fear and misinterpretation. Hypochondriacs are constantly worried about a variety of symptoms that they read into their bodies. A minor pain is scripted into a major illness and leads to thoughts of death. Yet, to describe this process as a disease is perhaps a grave error. The psychology of fear is not easy to pin down. Since so much of medicine is concerned with cause and effect, the idea that someone could imagine an illness seems to be outside of the pragmatic medical context of searching for cures. Imagination is the key here as is a process called projection. It is easy to imagine any number of problems in the complex biology of the human body. It is easy (but the consequences can be dire) to project an external problem into an internal space. At one point in some "jottings" that were found among Sigmund Freud's papers, he made the comment that "space is a projection of the psyche". What if the hyponchondriac body is an aesthetic projection? I will respond to this question in greater detail tomorrow.

Part Three