Love Yourself
Psychoanalysis helps us determine the side effects of traumatizing experiences. In Eight Bites by Carmen Maria Machado, writes eight bites to tell the story of an unnamed narrator who self-imposes a rule that she has to live by created a traumatizing experience for her. The narrator traumatizing experience began when she was younger, she always thought she was fat and needed to be skinny in order to look beautiful. Her mother told her all she needed was eight bites to enjoy her food and to look beautiful. In Machado’s eight bites Freud’s psychoanalytic concept of wishful leads to the narrator’s forced internal and external repression the narrator.
In Eight Bites, the narrator undergoes invasive weight loss surgery. The story a bitter fairytale complete with three unnamed sisters and rife with the grotesque cultural rhetoric that restricts women’s eating. What makes this fairytale so grotesque is the fact that even today in this generation that society makes hispanic latinas feel not comfortable in the skin their in which is very upsetting. Furthermore, the narrator experiences had involved the emergence of a wishful impulse which Freud defines as a sharp contrast with the subject’s other wishes and worse incompatible with the ethical and aesthetic standards of subject’s personality. An acceptance of the incompatible wishful impulses or a prolongation of the conflict produces a high degree of unpleasure; this unpleasurable is avoided through repression, an unconscious device to protect the subjects mental health. In Eight Bites the unnamed narrator wishful impulse is to eat more than just eight bites of food but “eight bites is all you need” Says mom, “to get the sense of what you are eating “(3). After eating eight bites of one plate she continues to eat only eight bites of every meal which satisfies her. “I ate eight bites and then stopped. I set the fork down next to the plate, more roughly that I intended, and took a chip of ceramic off the rim in the process. I pressed my finger into the shard and carried it to the trash can”(3).
Subsequently the narrator has this idea that once she gets the bariatric surgery she will be happy with the new skin she is in and that everything will be alright with her. But in reality this procedure is keeping the narrator to be happy with her possible/ future self. As Freudian concept of wishful impulse leading to repressing the desire but wants to eat more than eight bites. Something that the narrator has in her consciousness but is not taking action until getting the unconscious mind out. The narrator goes through these repressional challenges, one is internal repression, the narrator wants her daughter, Cal to accept that her mother is getting bariatric surgery. Even though Cal makes it very clear she does not accept that her mother is removing an important part of her body. “Jesus Christ is not a swear,” Cal yells “It’s a proper name. And if there’s ever a time to swear, it’s when your mom tells you she’s getting half of one of her most important organs cut away for no reason–”. The narrator believes, with the surgery she will no longer need to limit her eating only eight bites, that she will be content with the surgery. The narrator’s sisters who has had and encouraged her to do the surgery. “Whenever I talked to them, that was what always came out of their mouths, or really, it was a mouth, a single mouth that once ate and now just says, ‘I feel really, really good.” The weight-loss argot of transformation plagues the narrator even after she has had the surgery and awaits its effects. But also the narrator feels left out because she has always been different from to her sisters. “My sisters had gone somewhere else and left me behind, and as I always have, I wanted nothing more than to follow. I could not make eight bites work for my body and so I would make my body work for eight bites.” Beyond satisfaction with her body doing the surgery offer her connection to her sisters.
The narrator’s external repression which is her physical appearance. The narrator wants to be happy with herself and look into the mirror without feeling discomfort about her physical features. Post-surgery she’s able to do what she couldn’t do before.“I was tired of looking into the mirror and grabbing the things that I hated and lifting them, claw-deep, and then letting them drop and everything aching.” The narrator hates the way she looks. Before the surgery she wonders “Will I ever be done, transformed in the past tense, or will I always be transforming, better and better until I die?” Transformed, but she has a twist. Her fat returns to haunt her like a “ghost inverted” pure corporal. The narrator attacks her own flesh and rejoices in the act. “I am a new woman,” she announces. “A new woman does not just slough off her old self; she tosses it aside with force.”
In Eight Bites Freud’s psychoanalytic concept of wishful impulse leads to forced internal and external repressions for the narrator. In order to understand Eight Bites one needs to understand Freud’s concept of wishful impulse is a sharp contrast to the subject’s other wishes, wear as the wishful impulse incompatible with the ethical and aesthetic standards of subjects personality that leads into repression internally and externally. But the repressed wishful impulse Freud warns, that it continues to exist in the unconscious. For example you’re urge or wish to do something is on the lookout for an opportunity of being activated, and when that happens it succeeds in sending into consciousness a disguised and unrecognizable substitute for what had been repressed, and to this there soon become attached the same feelings of unpleasure which it was hoped had been saved by the repression. Have you ever had the urge or wish to do something that is out of you’re norm but you know once the act is done you’ll regret the mistake has been made?
Reflection
As I started to write my exploratory essay for FIQWS I needed to generate some ideas since I already read the story from Eight Bites in high school. I already explained in my homework assignment on how Eight Bites reminded me of myself but generally I wanted to talk about how the narrator has a wishful impulse that leads to her repressing these ideas. I always wondered if anyone has felt the urge or wish to do something that is out of their norm but they know once the act is done they’ll regret the mistake that has been made. I’ve always been curious to ask anyone this general question and writing an essay about it made me curious so I decided to write a thesis statement about it which I felt would explain how Freud’s concept comes into play with how I thought the story seemed in my point of view which surprised, intrigued and disturbed me in that sense because never would I think that bariatric surgery exits and females of any age are doing it today and writing this essay made me question society’s standards of beauty. I wish women like myself would learn to love the skin that they are in compared to the narrator in Eight Bites didn’t love her skin that she was due to her mental health and state she was in since her mother and sisters put this concept into her mind to do this instead of showing her the right way to be satisfied in eating and loving her body she’s in. This lead her to do certain psychotic things to herself. This story showed me a new perception on how to love yourself but do not fall into anyone’s influence on body image.
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