Plastic surgeries have been available for nearly the past century, but demand for medically unnecessary procedures to enhance appearance and reduce signs of ageing has intensified with the advent of neoliberalism. In what has been named the ‘Cosmetic Surgery Boom’ by the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, new figures show that 31,057 cosmetic procedures took place in the UK in 2022, the highest annual rise in procedures since the audit began in 2004. The consistent demand for anti-ageing and beautification technologies, coupled with advancements in surgical reconstructive methods and materials, has led to the proliferation of alternative ways of anti-ageing interventions. Injections and dermal fillers—now commonly referred to as ‘tweakments’—have democratised the anti-ageing market by making treatments financially accessible to the wider population, whilst once used to be exclusive to the very wealthy. Primarily offering non-surgical, temporary improvements of the skin’s appearance (softening wrinkles, lifting of cheekbones, or enlarging the lips), ‘tweakments’ also promise an improvement in one’s overall wellbeing. A ‘tweakment’ –a portmanteau of the verbs ‘to tweak and to treat’—is also seen as an expression of agency and individual responsibility. Erasing imperfections and reducing age lines becomes a ‘treat’ for the self, a form of self- care, offering immediate satisfaction, boosting one’s self-esteem, and countering feelings of helplessness against physical decline. Like plastic surgeries, ‘tweakments’, are currently viewed as an individual’s capacity to care for the body as effectively as possible. Given the exponential rise in aesthetic procedures and their ubiquity amongst younger and older generations (but still very gendered—in the UK in 2022 women underwent 93% of all cosmetic procedures recorded), this Special Issue seeks to initiate a dialogue on the subject of cosmetic interventions and body-image, femininity, ageing, narcissism, loss and the biopolitics of beauty, from a range of psychoanalytic and psychosocial perspectives.

Psychoanalysis has written about aesthetic plastic surgery as early as 1934 (Updegraff & Menninger), though an interest in the psychology of cosmetic surgery patients can be traced much earlier to the Wolf-Man (1918), whose obsessive concern with a small scar from a cyst removal became a focus of one of Freud’s most famous case studies. Furthermore, the skin and its role as enveloping the subject’s internal world, has occupied a central role in psychoanalytic theorisations of the mind-body relationship (Anzieu, 1989; Bick, 1967), providing thus, important interventions into how psychical distress can be expressed in the ways in which we relate to the skin. Similarly, Frantz Fanon (1952) has highlighted the skin's significance as a site of psychic, racial and socio-political power, that can contribute to marginalisation and the denial of humanity. More recently, Alessandra Lemma’s important study Under the Skin: A Psychoanalytic Study of Body Modification (2017) explores the unconscious phantasies and psychic disturbances that can motivate extensive modification of the body and excessive preoccupation with its appearance.

As body modification is a fundamentally psychosocial phenomenon, this Special Issue seeks to bring together clinicians and scholars from the fields of psychoanalysis, psychosocial and cultural studies, the sociology of ageing and the medical humanities to better understand the factors influencing people to undertake such procedures, as we all the personal and societal impact of the current cosmetic surgery and tweakments boom.

We are seeking original articles address questions such as: What are the psychodynamics of cosmetic surgery compared to non-surgical, non-permanent ‘tweakments’? How might psychoanalysis help us think through complex issues around feminism, patriarchal norms and cosmetic interventions? How does psychoanalysis understand the boundaries between pathologizing cosmetic interventions versus considering it an act of personal choice/agency? How might we think about the current cosmetic surgery boom as symptom and/or cause of psychic and societal disturbance?

Topics may include but are not limited to:

  • Anti-ageing modifications: theory and clinical examples
  • ‘Somatopsychic practices’ of psychoanalysis and cosmetic surgery
  • Race, class and cosmetic surgery
  • Anti-ageing self-care the ‘skin ego’
  • The botoxed self

Articles should not exceed 8,000 words in length, including references and, where they are used, endnotes.

Please send a 300 word abstract with a title and brief author biography to Emilia Halton-Hernandez e.halton-hernandez@essex.ac.uk and Marita Vyrgioti m.vyrgioti@essex.ac.uk by the deadline of the 28th February 2024.

First drafts of papers will then be expected by September 2024 for a final publication date in early 2025.