Autobiography of a Face by Grealy - Book Report/Review Example

Grealy underlines that her struggle between truth and beauty is a result of experiencing emotions more intensely; and, interestingly, it permits heightened accuracy in reporting about herself and her beauty. When persons with enhanced bodily awareness rated their degree of sociability, their ratings proved to be more highly correlated with measures of their actual sociable behavior than was true for subjects with limited bodily awareness. "When I tried to imagine being beautiful, I could only imagine living without the perpetual fear of being alone, without the great burden of isolation, which is what feeling ugly felt like" (Grealy 35).

This quote shows that her heightened awareness of her own body sensations facilitated detection that the self is actually producing no bodily effects. A second apparent major effect of the mirror experience is a decrease in self-esteem. Although there are definite exceptions, the experience tends to induce negative attitudes toward oneself. This is suggested that people become upset when they hear recordings of their own voices or are called upon to respond to other stimuli with self-connotations.

The third and perhaps most important consequence of magnifying self-awareness is increased conformity to the prevailing standard. People who are confronted with their mirror images seem to become sensitized to whether they are deviating from the salient values or rules. Grealy underlines that people become critical of their possible deviations from the standard. Persons who had not been made self-aware were more likely to judge their own performance by their personal standards rather than by the standards of others.

This ruins happiness and forces a person to feel miserable and lonely. The struggle between truth and beauty means a search for self and self-value. The increased self-focus set off by feedback can increase guilt, intensify self-dissatisfaction, and affect mood. Obviously, when subjects are asked in a laboratory context to tune into their own visceral events and try to report them as accurately as possible, they are made more self-aware and this may trigger all kinds of responses that may be experienced as unpleasant and which would then interfere with the self-perception process.

"As a child I had expected my liberation to come from getting a new face to put on, but now I saw it came from shedding something, shedding my image" (Grealy 22). There must be strong and persistent motivation for people to turn an objective eye upon their own body geography. One wonders whether experimental subjects who are asked to scrutinize their own body responses have been given sufficient motivation to devote themselves seriously to such a trying and perhaps at times even alarming task.

Also, under special circumstances, augmented self-focus can increase the accuracy of intuitive perception. This is an especially pertinent question when the task calls for a close examination of low level sensations and feelings whose contours are vague and have to be separated from an overlapping context of other body experiences. This examination calls for a relatively broad and also intensive sweep of the total body experiential field and