BY Silvia Miranda & Alicia Renou
My Sister’s Keeper is a drama film directed by Nick Cassavetes in 2009. It presents the story of Kate Fitzgerald, an adolescent girl who suffers from acute promyelocytic leukemia since childhood and as a result she’s waiting for several transplants. Unfortunately, even if her health is deteriorating rapidly, neither her younger brother Jesse, nor her parents Sara and Brian are genetically compatible. This is why in front of this helplessness, the couple will choose to resort to an “in vitro fertilization” in order to have a baby who is perfectly compatible with Kate’s genetics. Anna will be a “designer baby”, genetically selected in order to treat and save her sick elder sister. The two sisters have a happy life, punctuated, despite everything, by multiple operations and hospitalizations. Thanks to many donations of her little sister, Kate remains alive. Although she alternates periods of remissions and relapses, she manages to live normally as a teenager and she even has her first love relationship with another boy also suffering from leukemia.
Alas, against all odds this happiness comes to an end when Kate’s kidneys stopped working properly. Weakened by her disease, the urgency is such that she would need a transplant as soon as possible. But if the Fitzgeralds family is mobilized to save her, Kate is quite lucid about her inability to undergo yet another surgical intervention. That’s why she is going to ask her sister Anna to confront her parents and try to recover the right to dispose of her body and thus, to refuse any other operation. By this symbolic action, Kate seeks not only to put an end to her sufferings and those of her sister, but also that her parents accept the inevitable. But, does Anna have to accept this last request when she is the only and last chance of her sister’s survival?
Related to the movie My Sister’s Keeper, we have chosen to talk about the collapse of body image in women who suffer from cancer.
Body image was defined for the first time in 1935 by a psychoanalyst named Schilder and was specified by Françoise Dolto in 1984. It consists in unconscious and subjective representations that subject harbor regarding his body and developing along his life (Françoise Dolto, 1984). In other words, it refers neither to other’s perceptions about us from their representations nor to the manner that we present our body to the world. Lhermitte (1937) states that this image of the body is never acquired once and for all. Indeed, at any time, diseases but also the feeling of belonging to a group can bring about an identity reorganization as well as a modification in individual perceptions up to now established (mentioned by Jeannerod, 2010). In this case, according to White (2000) body image can be even more weakened if there is an important difference between the patient’s body such as it objectively shows itself at the moment and the mental representation that the person ideally has.
In the specific context of the illness of cancer, we have to understand that body image is jeopardized since the announcement of the disease. Moreover, Danièle Deschamps (1997) affirms that since the moment of the announcement of the word cancer ” the wings of desire break, and the spirit drowns in a bottomless abyss”. Indeed, the traumatic and death inducing characteristic of this experience gives rise to profound narcissistic injury in human beings who believed to be immortal (Francequin, 2012). From then on, phenomena of depersonalization can appear in the patient who does not feel like “living” in his own body anymore (Du Colombier, 2011). Anger, feeling of betrayal and lack of understanding can also quickly get the upper hand of the body that sometimes did not express any sign of weakness while disease has been underhandedly develop (Reich, 2009). In My Sister’s Keeper, Kate is affected by an extremely serious pathology that requires aggressive treatments. We notice at several times how difficult it is for her to live with this disease and with all that it implies. In fact, Kate finds herself confronted to several physical injuries: scars, baldness, sufferings as well as other side effects that are the result of many treatments (such as vomiting, weight loss, tiredness ..etc). This unexpected appearance and perception changings of her physics provoke even more distance from the representations that she developed of an ideal, healthy, fantasized body that are influenced by beauty criteria of society. Her own perceptions with which she shaped herself in the past collide today with altered image reflected by her close family (on herself) and with a corporeal experience that is not the same anymore. It is upsetting for Kate and she is caught up in defensive movements of rejection, disgust and shame about her body that henceforth make her suffer so much.
Following the first psychic disruption caused by the announcement of the illness, a second castration, which is this time physical, can be provoked and related to treatments and surgeries (Du Colombier, 2011). Just as responsible of a complete transformation of the body image, loss of hair, eyelashes and eyebrows caused by chemotherapy is the most difficult physical symptom to be experienced by patients. More precisely, in European culture hair embodies the symbol of femininity and beauty, it is an integral part of our identity (Reich, 2009). It is also an indicator of our state of health. In the past, any bald woman was likened to an unfaithful woman who had been shorn in a desire to make her less attractive. Later, this same punishment was used tragically to dehumanize prisoners and deported people (Vernet et al, 2007 & Francequin, 2012). Hair has always had a certain value in our society especially for the women who are constantly subjected to extreme beauty standards.
