Two psychotherapists take a first-ever look at modeling from theinside out and try to figure out why so many of the women who seem to have it all tend to wind up with so little.
It's funny. Tell intelligent people you want to write an article about models and modeling and they wave a hand in dismissal. "Fluff," they sneer, meaning they traffic only in Certified Serious Matters, not the "superficiality," the "triviality," the insubstantiality of appearances.
Consider with me a few things that I have long been thinking about. It's not just that models have an unrelenting grip on our imagination and are the number one idols of young women today. Or that we all attribute to them, project onto them, attitudes and ideals that are very telling of us and our society. Too, we confuse the models themselves with their images--a confusion that renders these very real women, and their real needs, invisible.
Models are ubiquitous; any reader of magazines today arguably has more contact with them than with flesh-and-blood friends and family. And, as we know, encounters with models' images on television and on the printed page have a virtually inescapable impact; in defiance of all reason and often biology as well, most women spend a great deal of time, money, and energy trying to look like them--and their successes no less than their failures wound deeply. How could anyone call the psychological transactions that take place between models and their viewers "fluff"?
So imagine my curiosity when a letter landed on my desk from two psychotherapists who were treating models, studying models, and had consulted with modeling agencies. Here's the kicker: both of them are themselves ex-models. "We have experienced their world from the inside out as well as the outside in," they wrote. It was in fact their own enjoyment of the glamorous world of modeling--and especially their success in eventually leaving it--that compelled them to take an unprecedented look at the makeup of models.
Fortuitously, both Vivian Diller, Ph.D., a psychologist and psychoanalyst, and Jill Muir-Sukenick, M.S.W., a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, live and practice in New York City, where PSYCHOLOGY TODAY is based. We met and we talked. Words and ideas spilled onto hours of tape. What follows is but a glimpse of the rich psychological turf models strut on. The blurring of fantasy and reality that takes place through the image of the model, I discovered, pervades every aspect of their young lives and seeps into everything they touch. Typically they are not prepared for the consequences. Then again, neither are we.
SO LONG, MODELING
Diller and Muir-Sukenick had met through their husbands, college friends. What a coincidence--both women were psychotherapists. And both had been models, as children and as young adults, with first-rate agencies, Diller with Wilhelmina, Muir-Sukenick first with Stewart, then with Ford.
Diller was a professional ballet dancer before turning to modeling. She left modeling in the late 1970s, when she started her doctoral dissertation and internship. "I was the All-American, Seventeen-type girl. They were always casting me younger than I really was." For a while, hers was the radiant face on a hair-color product, "even though I never dyed my hair." Mother of three, stepmother of one, she fit our talks between breast-feeding her four-month-old, seeing patients, and working out.
Whether posing or consulting, Muir-Sukenick has been in and out of modeling her whole life. She used her sophisticated good looks and demeanor to help finance her professional education. She gave up active modeling in 1981, when the first of her two children was born. For the past 15 years, she has been the image on the package of FemIron. She is currently active in the business as a counselor to models and consultant to agencies. She and Diller are very interested in the experience and perspective of older models, women in their 40s for whom new opportunities are opening in modeling. She regularly counsels a group of older models.
What, they began wondering, had enabled the two them to stop modeling and not become depressed, as is often the case after leaving the clothes, the parties, the spotlight, especially the spotlight, behind? "We have questioned why so many models enact a strange paradox. While they seem to have everything--beauty, access, money, adoration--many of them end up drugged out, washed up, or in some other way fallen from grace."
Exhibit A, of course, is Gia, whose short life and painful death, from AIDS, is chronicled in Thing of Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia by Stephen Fried (Pocket Books; 1993). And so they decided to interview models in depth.
"People are interested in the women we become," Lauren Hutton has said, the famous gap-toothed cover girl who dipped out of sight in the 1980s but whose career has rebounded since she hit 50 and dents started to appear in America's youth preoccupation. Sadly, "there is often not much to report," confide Diller and Muir-Sukenick. "With all their assets, few models go on to enjoy what one would expect life to bring them: husband, children, a fulfilling career that lasts beyond modeling's brief life span. We have come to believe the reason lies in the psychological makeup of the women who are drawn to the field.
