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is defined only recently, by feminist critique, as for example by Mosher.243 The judgmental attitude, characterized by a lack of knowledge and overload of attitude represents a social condemning of certain appearances, as fat, dirty, anorexic bodies, ugly, sick, or dead bodies, not even sparing corpses.
Amateur Self-Therapy Our contemporary age is being framed by a chronic need of the assistance of the psychiatrist. According to McLuhan we live in the Age of Anxiety.244 In contemporary, mediated society, people are willing to abandon their own cages while still being usable, migrating safely into virtual bodies, liberating themselves from pain, death and decay of physical body, as Narcissus seems to have done.245 While for McLuhan there is nothing wrong with the mediation of Narcissus, individual and social psychosomatics of the 20th century has rather condemned it.246 Narcissism of contemporary society is connected to self-help phenomena, Lasch has recorded; ‘The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety.’247 He saw ‘contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious’ providing thus a ground for the interpretation of self-help culture rising in 70s and growing since.248 That culture tends to the proliferation of psychiatric modes of thought, Lasch concluded.249 From Lacan on, ethical considerations in the global teaching and promotion of art therapy to non-art therapists, gained importance, as explained by Kalmanowitz and Potash.250 Today’s internet society promotes a variety of cheap replacements for expensive medicine, raising a paranoia about medicine, based on the argument that it is connected to the rapid development of the pharmaceutical industry, which exclusive goal is profit, not humanitarianism. While photo-therapy was promoted as a cure by real professionals in the field in the 80s, now it is promoted on DIY sites as a must-do activity.251 243 Michael A. Mosher, ‘The Judgmental Gaze of European Women: Gender, Sexuality, and the Critique of Republican Rule’, Political Theory 22 (1994). 244 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. 245 It is interesting to compare definitions of media body reference, as for example in Belting, who claims that on the perceptive level, as media also inscribes body experience it is plausible to analyze media as body. He says; ‘The notion that pictures are images embodied in media brings out body, a living medium of its own, back into the discussion.’ Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images, Picture, Medium, Body, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011, p. 11. 246 Since of DSM-5, narcissism is not proposed not to be taken as a distinct disorder any more. See: DSM5: Proposed Revisions: Personality and Personality Disorders’, American Psychiatric Association, (2010). 247 Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, p. XVI. 248 Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, p. 7. This, contemporary spiritualism reviews and exploits good effects of narcissism. See also: Ann Gleig, ‘The Culture of Narcissism Revised, Transformations of Narcissism in Contemporary Psychospirituality’, Pastoral Psychology 59 (2010), DOI: 10.1007/s11089009-027-9. 249 Expanding Jim Hougan’s thesis that ‘The anxieties at the Middle Ages are not much different than those of the present. Then as now, social upheaval gave rise to ‘millenarian sects’. Lasch, Culture of Narcissism, p. 4. 250 Kalmanowitz and Potash, ‘Ethical considerations in the global teaching and promotion of art therapy to non-art therapists’, The Arts in Psychotherapy 37 (2010): 20-26. 251 Amateurism is not a recent phenomenon, it had started already with the disappearance of arts and