Psychoanalyst Benjamin Kilbourne examines Disappearing Persons, Shame and Appearance

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A culture wrapped up in appearance, with few ways to understand ourselves except as others see us, or as we think we appear to others, can create a confusing life. Americans have got this bad, says Benjamin Kilborne, a psychoanalyst who lives in West Stockbridge and who recently published his book Disappearing Persons, Shame and Appearance. When we judge ourselves based on how we appear to others, the result can be at best confusing. What happens when our culture becomes based on appearances? “Close to the bone” is how Benjamin Kilborne talks about his book, Disappearing Persons, Shame and Appearance. Kilborne uses Greek myths, and more contemporary writers, including Kafka and Pirandello, to show us the facets of this phenomenon. Then he weaves stories of his clients or patients, and their struggles with related stories in their own lives. The stories are meant to be evocative, he said, with the world of Greek tragedy a baseline of ideas about the mind and the heart. “The psychoanalytic tradition is not distinct from these basic ideas about tragedy,” he says. In our culture, a lack of acceptance of what is, in fact, the tragedy of life gets us in trouble. Always keeping up appearances, not showing grief or pain, or aging, serves to dig us deeper into another tragedy than the one we’re avoiding. Kilborne started his book about a dozen years ago, when he had just experienced one of his own difficult moments. He became interested in the human tendency to not see our own shame. It plays out in therapeutic relationships, between client or patient and therapist or doctor. Humans have a tendency, played out in this relationship, to long to be recognized for who they are, but at the same time, they fear really being seen. Analysis and therapy are really explorations of self, he said, which lead to a healthy sense of freedom. Knowing what we want others to see and what we want to hide, is a step toward this freedom. Kilborne began his career as an anthropologist, and says he doesn’t practice psychoanalysis in a cultural vacuum. The values of culture and ego ideals people set for themselves can't be seen as completely distinct. In 21st century America, the culture provides new challenges to our sense of ourselves, how we appear and how we in fact feel. We base how we feel about ourselves on how we think we appear to others. But in this time and place, that can be especially elusive. “Because of things like plastic surgery, the media and public relations, we have been encouraged to believe we can control the way we appear. We try to control the way we feel by the way we appear. As a result, we become more and more dependent on others to know how we appear, and therefore, on others to know how we feel.” Los Angeles may have had as much an affect on Kilborne’s life as anthropology did. Now in his federal colonial house surrounded by calm colors, Berkshire landscape and his companion whippet nearby, it’s not easy to imagine him in the land of glitter. “Behind the false tinsel there’s the real tinsel,” he jokes of the saying he’s heard about Los Angeles. He lived in LA for 20 years where this fascination with appearances for self-awareness is “terrifically prevalent,” where “so much is image.” The Los Angeles experience spreads to the rest of the culture via media, and “instead of being human, we’re obsessed with a face lift. The face lift will never address the feelings of worthlessness.” He jokes about a story of Lincoln who is reported to have not hired a man for some top government job because he didn’t like his face. Lincoln is said to have claimed a man over a certain age is responsible for his face, you can tell a man by his face. Kilbourne says past 40 a man is responsible for his face. “Faces show who we are, so much more when we get older.” But why do people want to hide that in the mask of youth? Americans have the image problem but they also have another image they try to project: self-reliance. “Women weren’t as caught up in the image of self-reliance,” he says, but they are becoming more so too. Kilborne said it makes sense that Disneyland employees suffer a higher rate of depression than the general population: They always have to look happy and that takes its toll. The same goes for the general population. He says its better to face the sadness or mourning or grief, anger or vulnerability, or other aspects of the human experience and let them show. “If acknowledged, having these feelings of helplessness and shame can make us more complete human beings. But if the scramble after appearances is used repressively, there can be more and more casualties.” He transfers the discussion to the political realm where it can also be seen. In the last chapter in the book, he talks Stalin’s sadomasochistic tendency to control appearances in general. He was furious about an artists’ rendering of his ear, and was obsessed with showing himself to look “wise and glowing.” When he didn’t like a person, he had him removed from the photograph. In his book, Kilborne talks about how his fear of being exposed and really seen was “a terror that drove his cruelty and sadism.” In our interview, Kilborne comments that as with Stalin and others more or less extreme, “unacknowledged shame has a great deal to do with intolerance and cruelty.” “Technology actually can contribute to illusions of control because it can feed our illusion that we have control over things, that we are the captains of our ship and the masters of our soul. If we’re not, then we should be--we think-- and we certainly shouldn’t tell others that we’re not!” Kilbourne’s book is about the Greeks and others, and his clients in psychoanalysis, but it doesn’t have a lot of jargon and he says it’s really intended for students and a lay audience anyway. He says he wrote it for the “gentle reader.”
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MCLA Announces Four Finalists for Next President

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts announced four finalists for the position of president, following a national search. 
 
The finalists were selected by the MCLA Presidential Search Committee and will participate in on-campus visits scheduled for the weeks of April 6 and April 13.
 
The successful candidate will replace President James Birge, who is retiring at the end of the term. 
 
The four finalists are David Jenemann, Michael J. Middleton, Sherri Givens Mylott, and Diana L. Rogers-Adkinson.
 

David Jenemann
David Jenemann is dean of the Patrick Leahy Honors College and professor of English and film and television studies at the University of Vermont, where he oversees recruitment, retention, curricular innovation, and advancement for an interdisciplinary college serving undergraduates from across the university, including UVM's campuswide Office of Fellowships, Opportunities, and Undergraduate Research. 
 
An internationally recognized scholar, he has published three books and numerous articles, with research spanning intellectual and cultural history, mass media, and the intersection of sports and society.
He holds a doctor of philosophy from the University of Minnesota and completed the Institute for Management and Leadership in Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education.
 
 
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