Psicanálise, cultura capitalista e as cirurgias estéticas: aprimoramento do corpo ou encobrimento da falta?

Abstract

The conception of the body, based on psychoanalytic discourse, proposes a peculiar way of understanding the relationships between the body and culture. Freudian investigations into human sexuality, especially into the phenomena of hysteria, inspired the inauguration of psychoanalysis as a new method of treating neuroses. Given the perspective of a body that is constituted through language, comprising subjective aspects of each person's history and their relationship with the Other, the constitution of the body is not a purely biological event. In this way, it is understood that our constitution is permeated by cultural discourses. Considering that we are inserted in an economic system guided by capitalism, responsible for promoting an ideology of the ideal and perfect body, valuing unattainable physical characteristics as a profit strategy, we ask: how does capitalist culture participate in the speaker's relationship with his own body? Through the marketing of products and services related to beauty, industries propagate an ideal body image, which promotes high consumption and exploits people's dissatisfaction with their bodies. The large number of aesthetic procedures attests and points to Brazil as the second country that performs the most plastic surgeries in the world. Thus, from a psychoanalytic perspective, we investigate how the body is constituted, we question the aspiration for the perfect body and body modifications as a way of dealing with the fundamental lack - castration. Furthermore, we discuss the great marks that capitalist culture leaves on the subject, the history of beauty and the ways in which this cultural system uses these offers to promise happiness and completeness for subjects who, structurally, cannot fill the lack . Thus, the subject's experience with the body has complexities that go beyond the solutions of capitalist logic.