Two psychotherapists take a first-ever look at modeling from the inside out and try to figure out why so many of the women who seem to have it all tend to wind up with so little.
It's funny. Tell intelligent people you want to write an article about models and modelling and they wave a hand in dismissal. "Fluff," they sneer, meaning they traffic only in Certified Serious Matters, not the "superficality," the "triviality," the insubstantiality of appearances.
Consider with ma a few things that I have long been thinking about. It's not just the models have an unrelenting grip on our imagination and are the number one idols of young women today. Or that we all attribute to them, project onto them, attitudes and ideals that are very telling us and our society. Too, we confuse the models themselves with their images--a confusion that renders these very real women, and their real needs, invisible.
Models are ubiquitous; any reader of magazines today arguably has more contact with them than with flesh-and-blood friends and family. And, as we know, encounters with models' images on television and on the printed page have a virtually inescapable impact; in defiance of all reason and often biology as well, most women spend a great deal of time, money, and energy trying to look like them--and their success no less than their failures wound deeply. How could anyone call the psychological transactions that take place between models and their viewers "fluff"?
So imagine my curiosity when a letter landed on my desk from two psychotherapists who were treating models, studying models, and had consulted with modeling agencies. Here's the kicker: both of them are themselves ex-models. "We have experienced their world from the inside out as well as the outside in," they wrote. It was in fact their own enjoyment of the glamorous world of modeling--and especially their success in eventually leaving it--that compelled them to take an unprecedented look at the makeup of models.
Fortuitously, both Vivian Diller, Ph.D., a psychologist and psychoanalyst, and Jill Muir-Sukenick, M.S.W., a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, live and practice in New York City, where PSYCHOLOGY TODAY is based. We met and we talked. Words and ideas spilled onto hours of tape. What follows is but a glimpse of the rich psychological turf models strut on. The blurring of fantasy and reality that takes place through the image of the model, I discovered, pervades every aspect of their young lives and seeps into everything they touch. Typically they are not prepared for the consequences. Then again, neither are we.