Reprinted with permission of the publisher of The PANY Bulletin
Psychoanalytic Association of New York
Volume 39, Number 3 Fall 2001
Book Review:
Body Talk: Looking and Being Looked At in Psychotherapy
by Janice S. Lieberman
Jason Aronson, 2000, 305 pp.
Reviewer: Leon S. Anisfeld, D.S.W.
Dr. Janice Lieberman is a psychologist and psychoanalyst who has provided the reader of this book with a most interesting essay on the importance of vision in the psychoanalytic clinical setting, as well as its impact on the many different aspects of the visual image in the perception of the other and of the self. It addresses the importance of the “visual” in the construction of identity and the establishment and maintenance of interpersonal communication in psychoanalytic treatment, in literature, and in film. Dr. Lieberman, who is a well trained psychoanalyst and a teacher and supervisor of psychoanalysis, is also an expert in the area of art. In this volume, she applies her interest in visual art and artists to the area of art and communication, and applies her hypothesis concerning the role of the visual to the very wide canvas of fine art, as well as to her psychoanalytical exploration of interpersonal behavior and intrapersonal development.
In short, in Body Talk, Lieberman speaks of a number of subjects that she takes to be of everyday concern and of a wide spectrum of specialized areas of knowledge and precious and very special human talent. It was especially exciting to travel so smoothly between so many areas of distinctive artistry and to realize their common ground. The range of subjects that Dr. Lieberman analyzes in this book is indeed very impressive, and demonstrates how important a scholarly, open mind with a relation to the world at large can be, rather than what is so often the case, namely. a specialized knowledge of a topic within the confines of the relation of that single topic to a specialized material subject area, such as psychology.
This broad-based approach, taking the visual in its relation to many other subjects of interest, is also displayed in this volume in Dr. Lieberman’s examination of “the gaze,” which is viewed developmentally in the child’s relation to its mother; in the quality of an individual’s interpersonal contact with others, as described by the “mutual gaze” of those (e.g. close friends) who are parties to an interpersonal contact; and the manner in which the gaze develops during the child’s development, thus demonstrating the place of the gaze in the development of the body image, of narcissism, etc.
Among Lieberman’s interests is the “mirror” in its developmental and Lacanian meanings; pathological obsession with beauty, including the elevation of culturally defined standards of thinness to overall notions of beauty and by extension, to the choice of friends and love objects; perverse expressions of looking and being looked at, as they manifest in voyeurism and exhibitionism; and technical problems in working with patients whose concreteness is such that they cannot readily move from the literalness of the spoken word or visual image to the metaphoric.
The author seems to me to be much more interested in the patient’s “real life” and in how the therapeutic interaction will result in a positive change in the patient’s life, rather than in whether the intervention is “neutral” or psychoanalytically “correct”.Thus, Dr. Lieberman writes of her interventions as attempts to aid her patients in understanding their projections, and speaks less of whether an intervention is a “self-disclosure” on the analyst’s part than of whether a self-disclosure, for example, is “suitable”, that is, whether the intervention models “a vision of psychologically healthy ways in which to live” (p.207). This is a more pragmatic and “relevant-to-life” criterion than is often invoked to judge analytic interventions. That notwithstanding, Lieberman convincingly argues for the necessity of such an orientation with patients, particularly when distortions of looking and being looked at have interfered with heathy adaptation and interpersonal relations.