Modified Mastectomy and Body Image

Abstract

Beginning from the early 1950s, when members of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Chicago undertook an in-depth study of 60 women suffering from breast cancer, psychological characteristics of these patients have been described and have since been largely confirmed in numerous studies (Fox 1978). Nevertheless our expectations that these psychological findings, which describe breast cancer patients as altruistic, suppressing feelings, rationalizing, and harmonizing, might be of any help in developing supportive psychological care have not been fulfilled. Furthermore, remarkable differences have been found in the prone-ness of women to seek and obtain effective medical care, depending on the woman’s education and her socioeconomic background. Early discovery and consequently early treatment onset still correlate with better prognosis (Henderson 1980). So the purpose of our own study was to look into social data, personality traits and behavior patterns of breast cancer patients in connection with the delay, i.e., the time between first discovery of the breast lump and onset of effective medical care. Our hypotheses have included the two as follows:

• 1. Women having personal experience with dramatic physiological changes of pregnancy, delivery, and breast feeding might be less alert to changes in the breast and therefore less eager to seek medical care.

• 2. Those women who have been informed that the consequence of the discovery of a breast lump is not necessarily total mastectomy should consequently not hesitate to seek medical care. They should be told that an operation not as mutilating as a radical mastectomy could more easily be tolerated, thus encouraging them to seek medical care. A lumpectomy is not as threatening to the body image as a mastectomy.