The Myth of Normal 167

Mechanisms for estranging people from themselves abound. They begin acting on us from the earliest moments of our existence with stresses in the parenting environment and socially sanctioned child-rearing practices that negate the child’s needs. The flight from self is powerfully compounded by overt trauma, of course. But even in the absence of personal wounding it can be impelled by a conformist and competition-centered educational system, by social expectations to “fit in,” the drive for peer acceptance, and a socially induced, pervasive anxiety about one’s status. In an image-mad culture that sustains itself in large part by making people feel inadequate about themselves—or, more insidiously, capitalizing (pun half intended) on these preexisting feelings—the media holds out ideals of physical perfection against which young and old measure themselves and which lead people to be ashamed of their very bodies. My friend Peter Levine wrote an article some years ago on the cosmetic procedure of injecting people with botulinum toxin; the substance relaxes muscles, temporarily, so as to remove the natural wrinkles from aging. But it also renders the face unnaturally less responsive. “There are nursing mothers taking Botox,” Peter told me. “They are not able to communicate their emotions with their babies, or even pick up the babies’ emotions. They lose that kind of contact.” In many other spheres, including social media, we too often present an artificial, “Botoxed” version of ourselves: an image not of who we are but of how we would like to be perceived by others. “What we have with the internet is sort of a Botox for the masses,” Peter said. “We have just lost this capacity to be real, which is fundamentally what makes us human, and what makes us feel connected to each other.” The Second “Character” Trait: Consumption Hunger Among the great achievements of mass-consumption culture has been to convince us that what we have been conditioned to fervently want is also what we need. In the words of the French-Bulgarian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, “Desires are manufactured as surely as are the commodities meant to fulfill them. We consume our needs, unaware that what we take to be a ‘need’ has been artificially produced.”[6] I’m reminded of a response a young