Someone Else's Face in the Mirror: Identity and the New Science of Face Transplants

(Hardback)

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In 2005, surgeons in France removed part of the face from a cadaver and grafted it onto the head of a 38-year-old woman grossly disfigured by a dog attack. Three years later, in December, 2008, surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic announced they had performed the first U.S. face transplant. Although modern culture is accustomed to pushing medicine and the human body beyond all limits, the world's first partial face transplant and the seven that have followed have caused a stir that still reverberates globally. This book begins with the story of Isabelle Dinoire, the recipient of the first face transplant, and chronicles her surgery and battles with tissue rejection. Its scope widens with a look at how surgical teams, including three U.S. transplant teams, are in a global race to perform the first full face transplant, and at how medical history has led up to this pointwith prior successful transplants ranging from body parts as simple as cornea to those as neurologically complicated as the heart, a hand, and a penis. The most novel among these surgeriesthe face transplantconjures up particular and expansive psychological issues. Authors Bluhm and Clendenin show how transplant recipients struggle with functional issues including a lifetime of anti-rejection drugs, a danger highlighted by the recent death of the second face transplant patient, in China. But just as challenging in the case of face transplant is the psychological effect onand potential threat toidentity. Who are you, if suddenly your faceor a significant portion of itis not what you were born with What is it like to look in the mirror, and see a face that is not the one you have always had Dinoire lamented, "It will never be me." That statement is an absolute simplification of the identity issues a face transplant can create, explain the authors. Bluhm and Clendenin show how, across history and media, humankindvia medicine, literature, film, and other mediahas dreamed of a day when face transplants would be possible. With so many disfigurements occurring among the military in Iraq, and experimental face transplants too expensive for implementation in the private sector, it is likely that the U.S. military will take the reins and further face transplant techniques as quickly as possible to serve injured personnel.

Reviews

While the clinical and historical aspects of the surgical procedures are aimed at medical professionals, general readers will appreciate the themes of identity, change and recovery. * SciTech Book News *
Someone Else's Face in the Mirror gives students, practitioners, and others the opportunity to think about identity from a different perspective. Psychopathology can cause major shifts in how people perceive themselves. Genetic disorders and other diseases can also affect self-perception. As faces lead people into every interpersonal contact, trauma that includes facial disfigurement increases the difficulty of treatment. Practitioners need to support medical treatments that improve a person's chance of a life that is suited to that person. Someone Else's Face in the Mirror allows professionals to grapple with an issue that might not come up otherwise and to form an opinion that each can then use to advocate for clients and patients. It also allows the reader to take a fresh look at how psychoanalytic theories can be expanded to explain and create interventions that treat and resolve physical and psychological trauma. That could then become the personal integration of innovative technique, trauma, and identity. * PsycCRITIQUES *

Author Bio

Carla Bluhm, is Developmental Psychologist and Visiting Assistant Professor at Allegheny College, in Pennsylvania. She has also been Assistant Professor or Adjunct Professor at Westminster College, University of Washington, Arizona State University, University of Rhode Island, and Columbia University. Nathan Clendenin, is Doctoral Candidate in Clinical Psychology at Duquesne University. He has been an Instructor at Allegheny College.