It’s only ugly who wants it? Transmuted bodies in search of an identity: a psychoanalytical look at female subjectivity

Abstract

Nowadays, more and more women are looking for aesthetic plastic surgeries, in search of an ideal of beauty, for whom the image has become the engine of happiness. This article aims to understand what women residing in Brazil are looking for with multiple plastic surgeries and what psychic consequences they have in the face of these procedures. The research was characterized by being qualitative, exploratory, and descriptive, with the sample consisting of eight women, selected via social networks, and who underwent at least four types, or more, of cosmetic surgeries. The interviews took place in person and online, through the Google Meet platform. Content analysis was conducted according to Bardin (2020), where three categories emerged: “Multiple aesthetic plastic surgeries: a new birth?”, “P, PP, M, G, GG: what is the pattern?” and “Psychic developments: it became an obsession, I want to be perfect”. From the results, it was found that, for all the women participating in this research, the search for the ideal(lized) body through multiple plastic surgeries, obsessively and sometimes insufficiently, became a cause of anguish. It is concluded, at the end of this research, that 90% of the interviewees present psychic suffering, caused by this tireless and unbridled search for an unfeasible body.