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In the past, phenomenological research on subjective body experience was characterised by vaguely defined terminology and methodological shortcomings. The term "body image" has been applied heterogeneously in literature in order to describe a variety of bodily phenomena. In this paper, the German terminology applied to the phenomenology of body experiences is described systematically. In developing a systematic terminology the authors refer to scientific evidence as well as recent reviews, and closely adhere to definitions commonly used in English literature. Different perspectives are utilised, particularly anthropological concepts and theories from developmental and self-psychology. Distinct aspects of body experience are described within the context of a network of external determinants and along a continuum between somatic and mental anchor points. Applying the term "body experience" as umbrella term, different aspects are defined: perceptive (body schema/-perceive), affective (body-cathexis), cognitive-evaluative (body-image, body-ego) and body-consciousness. It is emphasized, that the distinct description of functional levels has to be taken as an approximation of the reality of integrated body experience.

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Copyright of Zeitschrift für Transaktionsanalyse is the property of Julius Beltz GmbH & Co. KG Beltz Juventa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Due to progress in burn treatment, more patients even with severe burn injuries survive. Despite this positive development, however, there are still negative somatic and mental consequences. These include the life-long care of scars and pain. In addition, posttraumatic-stress disorder and depression are common consequences. Also distress due to disfigurement and body image problems have to be considered, since this is likely to result in social withdrawal, low self-esteem, and reduction of quality of life. Overall, the impact of mental strain on burn victims is quite high. Therefore, psychotherapeutic treatment approaches should be integrated into the care of patients with burns. This might be helpful for both coping and compliance with long-term treatment. This paper provides a review of the mental co-morbidity of burn victims and of psychotherapeutic treatment approaches focusing on changes in body image and the respective social consequences., (© Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York.)

The origins of obesity can be traced back at least 25 000 years. In the Stone Age, in the Middle Ages, and in the 17th century overweight indicated prosperity,power, and fertility, but already Hippocrates described obesity as a disease in the Antique. The first academic papers dealing with adiposity were published in the times of the Industrial Revolution.In the 19th century a pharmaceutical treatment boom against overweight emerged- people had to deal with quackery and dangerous remedies like amphetamines that flooded the market.Bariatric surgery was introduced in the 20th century- to days gold standard is the RYGB operation. Dealing with morbid obesity and its comorbidities is nowadays one of the serious problems in the field of public health.

The present paper examined the connection between a negative body image and body complaints in N = 788 persons above 60 years of age from the general population. From a psychosomatic view, it is to be expected that psychological adjustment problems to the aging body are accompanied by physical complaints. A cluster analysis resulted in a group of older people with a strongly negative body image and a high degree of body complaints. This group is mainly formed by women, persons in high age, elderly alone living and persons with little social support. A second cluster includes persons with a positive body image and few body complaints. These are mainly younger persons, men, persons with a high degree of social support and older people living in a partnership. A further cluster includes persons with a very negative body image, however, with few body complaints. These persons are younger and more often live in a partnership, compared to the elderly with negative body image and a high degree of body complaints. A fourth cluster represents persons with a low degree of a negative body image and few body complaints. Their vitality and physical well-being, however, are also low. The study confirms that body complaints are partly determined by the body image. Sex, life in partnership and social support are risk or protective factors, respectively.

Aesthetic surgery has evolved in the past years from a genuine medical practice to a mere commodity. From an ethical point of view one must ask whether this evolution creates more problems than it solves. The present paper elaborates four arguments against this evolution and shows that an aesthetic surgery which works only according to market categories runs the risk of losing the view for the real need of patients. An aesthetic surgery that understands itself as part of a market will be nothing else than a part of a beauty industry which has the only aim to sell something, but not the aim to help people. Such an aesthetic surgery makes profit from the ideology of a society that serves only vanity, youthfulness and personal success and which is losing the sight for real values. The real value of man cannot be reduced to its appearance and medicine as an art should feel the obligation to resist these modern ideologies and should help people to get a more authentic attitude to themselves. If aesthetic surgery fails to think about these implications it will lose its identity as medicine which would be a too great loss.

The scarcity of normative texts from the areas of early geriatric and gynaecological specialist literature as well as of common handbooks for women, makes it difficult to make any general statements on the ageing woman in the early modern times. It is only with the emancipation from antique tradition in the 18th century that greater attention was given to "new" topics such as the menopause and its consequences. The aim of this paper is firstly to use non-medical sources to examine what was for a long time a negative picture of the older woman, before then analysing fragments on anatomy and physiology, pathology and therapy of the female in old age from early modern times, as well as references to longevity and rejuvenation. There was no unified concept of female old age within medicine, and certainly no indication of the medicalisation of older women; social realities had at best a marginal influence on these ideas. There seemed to be no autonomous pathogenetic principle of female old age; it would seem that the loss of menstruation (and with it of her sexual identity) was considered to bring the elderly woman nearer to the masculine physiology of ageing, although the ageing process in the female sex was also characterised by hypersexualisation and longevity.

The present paper introduces a new method for diagnosing the body image and reference to the integrational level of personality structure. First the body image is defined using five criteria: consciousness, flexibility, intersubjectivity, representational links to thought contents, and level of structural integration of the personality. Using axis four of the Operationalised Psychodynamic Diagnostics (OPD) as a starting point, dimensions are defined and described that allow assessment of the body image according to structural dimensions of the personality. The structural diagnostics of the body image can serve as a basis for a new rating instrument of body image integration.

The HIV-associated lipodystrophy syndrome is a new disease entity and a result of the otherwise successful antiretroviral therapy. It consists of metabolic disorders which may in part lead to an increased cardiovascular risk or hyperlactatemia resulting in increased morbidity and mortality. The change in body shape is often disfiguring and diminishes the quality of life of the affected individual substantially. The present paper reviews the current options and limits to treat the various components of the syndrome.

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Copyright of Zeitschrift für Qualitative Forschung (ZQF) is the property of Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Unlabelled: This phenomenological study aimed at problematizing the living body as experienced by American women who suffered from breast cancer and underwent chemotherapy. Forty-eight interviews were collected from 18 women over a period of six months for another study. A secondary analysis was performed. It centered on the following three questions: 1. How do bodily changes impact on the women's embodied self-understanding? 2. How does bodily subjection to medical treatments illuminate professional and self's relationships to the body? and 3. What kind of knowledge about the body and the illness do the women express?, Results: 1. Central in the patients' accounts were experiences of "I cannot" (any more) or "I can" (again). 2. Illness and bodily subjection to medical interventions influenced the women's relationship with their body. Five different patterns of "I"-body-relationships are described. They varied between "I"-body-oneness and "I"-body distance. 3. The women expressed varying levels of knowledge as they talked about bodily experiences and the illness. Vernacular concepts, medical concepts and complex medical knowledge were expressed. The paper emphasizes the existential importance of "I can" or "I cannot" experiences.

This paper deals with the development of empathy during the second year of life. Empathy is defined as understanding another person's emotional state by vicariously sharing this state. In contemporary discussion, empathy is not clearly distinguished from emotional contagion, in which the Subject is indistinctly incorporated into the other person's mood. Most authors must therefore stipulate additional cognitive mechanisms, such as perspective taking, or even a theory of mind, to supply the empathic observer with the insight that it is, and remains, another person's emotional state which he shares. Contrary to this notion, the present paper proposes that insight is mediated by the particular quality of the empathical response itself and that self-objectification is the only relevant precondition of empathy, since it allows drawing a clearcut distinction between the emotional domains of self and other. Since self-objectification is also responsible for recognizing oneself in a mirror, empathy should emerge simultaneously with self-recognition. This was tested in an investigation on 36 girls and boys aged 14 to 22 months. In two separate sessions the subjects underwent a "rouge test" for self-recognition and were confronted with a person in need, who demonstrated grief. Empathy was operationalized by prosocial interventions. The study replicates the results of a previous investigation (Bischof-Köhler, 1988, 1991) with a modified empathy-eliciting situation. In both experiments, only those Subjects who recognized themselves tried to help, whereas non-recognizers stayed indifferent.

Following a quotation of Marcel Proust about his own body experience, the paper begins with some of the reasons for the--more frequency unconscious than conscious--fears of ones own body and the reasons for its alienation. As a result of unfavourable conditions during development, in particular during the early developmental stages, undifferentiated and more physically dependent emotions are experienced as threatening, since they endanger personal integration. An additional factor is the identification of certain regions of the body with malignant object representations. There follow examples of the application of physical metaphorics in politics and mythology. The present-day role of body-orientated psychotherapy forms and their unconcluded problems are discussed at the end of the paper.

Bodily Experience is well reflected in psychoanalysis and psychosomatic medicine, the body is not forgotten. The first part of the paper summarizes the general and clinical knowledge on bodily experience. The second part deals with some still neglected dimensions of bodily experience. The first two dimensions are clinical perspectives. 1. The (ill) body can be functionalized as a help to stabilize fragile body boundaries. 2. The body is determined not only by intrapsychic conflicts but also by social influences, so that bodily behavior might not necessarily reflect intrapsychic attitudes but social (hyper-)adaptation. The following two dimensions may be important for psychosomatic research. 3. Causal and unidirectional models of body-soul influences lack complexity and should be replaced by differentiated interactional models. 4. Empirical studies on body experience have to take into account its subjective and unconscious character. Qualitative methods might be very helpful here.

The present paper deals with the problematic nature of the phenomenological grasping of the consciousness of the body and its pathological modifications. The reasoning is oriented by the doctrine of Husserl of the so-called sentiments as the fundamentals of the experience of the own body. This basic approach does not only seem to be basically for a psychology of the consciousness of the body, but also to give the theoretical-conceptual structure for a great number of psychopathological modifications. Subsequent to a criticism of the conventional use of the term 'hallucination of the body' we attempt to chart elements of a scheme of the abnormal consciousness of the body.

In this paper the function of food and of the own body in anorexia and bulimia is understood as representations of good and bad mother objects. In anorexia nervosa the body in the state of underweight is the good mother-object ("not-mother"), the too heavy body is the bad mother-object ("like mother"). In bulimia the wish for incorporation of a good object (food before binging) and the following panic of the fusion with a bad object (food after eating) is acted out. Body and food, substituting mother objects, are manageable, the illusion of controlling self-object-boundaries is maintained. Thus anorexia and bulimia are understood as an attempt to cope with fear of fusion as well as of separation, which is revived in adolescence.

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