Vous consultez« Mon corps n’est pas le bon ».

‘My Body is not Right.’ On the Body, Media Hype and the Medical Profession as Compromised.
Large numbers of individuals, be it on television or internet, can be heard expressing their desire to remove a healthy part of their body – either through amputation or surgical removal after self-mutilation. They each repeat the same stereotyped ideas, explaining how their body is not right for them and how much better they would feel after the amputation of the limb (s) supposedly ‘attached to their body but without properly belonging to it.’ The language they use is characterised by a rich vocabulary which has found an eloquent echo among members of the medical profession. Identity disorder and bodily integrity were born from this and are soon to be indexed in the new DSM-V. Over and above the pathogenic hypotheses the emergence of this spectacular new pathology invites us to consider, it also raises the question of the influence of body image and the role of the body in general in our culture, the power of the media and their capacity to hype up certain issues and the effect this morbid phenomenon has had on the stance of the medical profession.

Keywords
Identity disorder, Bodily integrity disorder