BODY AND SELF-IMAGES ASSOCIATED WITH AUDIO-VISUAL SELF-CONFRONTATION

A new theoretical framework for encompassing the multiple contemporary concepts of body images and self-concepts is presented, within which each self-experience may be described in terms of position on three independent dimensions: genetic developmental level, degree of consciousness, and experiential quality (conation-emotion-cognition). Develop-mentally successive layers of self-experience form around each other as layers of an onion, with some of these layers referring to body, others to self-images. The concept of regression under the stress of self-confrontation to earlier self-perceptions is introduced as a working hypothesis in this study. Reactions to confrontation with films of themselves are described and discussed for a population of hemophilic patients, children, adolescents, and adults, who participated in a longitudinal study investigating personality and psychodynamic correlates to hemorrhaging in hemophiliacs. Younger children most often were excited and pleased about seeing themselves, and exhibited frank narcissism. They did not separate phenomenologically from the film image, but perceived it as an extension of a barrierless self. They focused attention on the body and on unmodified drive states. Older children were concerned with the way they appeared to others, but the self still was experienced in terms of physical body aspects. Older children and young adolescents often made use of denial to cope with these self-perceptions. Adolescents frequently used conscious self-concepts as a defense agains threatening covert images, and their self-reactions had interpersonal reference. Adult subjects perceived the self-confrontation as a social situation calling for self-criticism, and their self-experiences were more abstract, cognitive, and partly conscious. They struggled to improve control over perceived “give aways” of underlying dangerous self-images. The effect of audio-visual self-confrontations depends on the subject's developmental level and ego defenses, and vary from non-therapeutic disintegration of perceived self- and body barriers, to therapeutic and integrative incorporation of central aspects of self (insight) in patients with sufficient ego capacity. © Williams & Wilkins 1969. All Rights Reserved.