Body image-is like home base on the love map. Take a good, long look in the mirror, naked if you have the courage, and describe out loud how your body looks and feels. If you really have courage, try this with your partner standing by your side.
“There we stood,” said the wife. “It was surprising. We didn’t get past the hair on our heads. We looked at our own, each other’s,
and talked about it. Maybe it was just safer to talk about that, but I never realized he felt his was too thin. I have always felt mine was too thin. It has bothered me for years.”
How we think we look is a key in our love map, a type of legend and scale for interpreting the map and for reading other persons’ maps, for we tend to pick partners that we perceive as maybe just a few steps up from our own place on the body market. Even children rapidly develop good or poor body images, which sometimes sentence them to the sidelines at dances and to a loneliness that is based on a hypercritical, usually unrealistic self-appraisal.
I have three hundred slides of the work of major artists. These are all nude paintings, and I have my patients pick the one painting they feel most resembles them. This assignment is usually fun and sometimes most enlightening, especially when I also have them select a slide that most resembles their partner. Looking at and discussing these pictures usually helps defuse the anxiety over the body-image issue and teaches about the wide range of human appearance and the perceptions of that appearance.
I help my patients discuss feelings about their genitals and other erotic zones. Most men seem to feel that penises come in one size, too small. Women seldom talk much about genital appearance, but describe their breasts in two sizes, too big or too small. It is helpful to break down the barriers that exist between the body generally and the erotic zones specifically, integrating both into a sensuous gestalt.
When I lectured on this concept of the sensuous gestalt, one woman told me after the lecture that she thought “sensuous hole” might be a better term. She added, “After all, I think I have what I call a ‘grand opening.’ Let me tell you, women do not have penis envy; men might have vaginal awe.” Even in her humor, you can see the anxiety we have about perhaps the least important element of the sexual system, the genitalia.
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