You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Hair crosses the boundaries between inside and outside, hidden and shared. Perhaps because hair begins inside of us, its roots invisible, and then grows outside, some part of us feels exposed by its journey, as if it carries secret truths from within and broadcasts them from the tops of our heads. We can manipulate hair to make it look different to its normal, so-called ‘given’ state and hence ‘cover up’ its origins, but more or less consciously we all know the truth about our hair, which we carry inside us – one narrative amongst others that is revealed through our body’s appearance.
Hair is public, political but also, always, highly personal. For all of us head hair is one of our most important physical features, so much so that both men and women in all cultures and across historical periods have been invested in its adornment and/ or modification. Curled, slicked-back or straightened, tied in tight little buns or floating out in the breeze like a windsock, human beings have been cutting, styling and colouring their hair for an extraordinarily long time (Corson, 2012).
In this chapter I want to focus on the psychic roots of hair, that is, its emotional significance in our unconscious. But before turning to a specifically psychoanalytic focus I will start by briefly reviewing biological and sociocultural perspectives on hair.
The hair’s external health and beauty, or its opposite brittleness and fragility, are felt somehow to reflect in some fundamental way our internal state – a periscopic reversal we cannot control. Indeed we all have a sense that hair contains vital information about us, that it somehow tells a story. By ‘information’ I am referring here to biological, social and psychological information.
Let us start with the biological information1 contained in hair. This is important because it may provide a biological basis for hair’s felt-to-be emotional significance in so far as hair is felt to be revealing of the self’s state (somatic and psychi