The Ideal Self

In the previous chapter, we saw that women’s social anxiety was not only predicated on others’ perceptions of their bodies, but that it extended to others’ perceptions of their entire selves. In this chapter, I use the work of anti-psychiatrist R. D. Laing to explore how participants experienced this. I examine how they described cultivating an acceptable outward, or ‘false’, self which comports with feminine norms and others’ expectations. This then stands in contradistinction to their ‘true’ self—who they really are and how they really feel. I probe how gendered social conditions give rise to this cleavage and, in turn, how many of the women’s accounts evoke the idea of an ‘inner critic’. In so doing, I find significant overlap between their experiences and the DSM-5’s ‘Dissociative Disorders’. In the spirit of Laing’s work, I put forth that considering women’s socialisation renders these experiences intelligible. Moreover, given that this group of diagnostic categories has hitherto not been linked to SAD, I contend that the inner world of the socially anxious woman is vastly under-researched and poorly understood. As such, it warrants greater attention if we are to render this position understandable and have any hope of alleviating her distress.