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Gilman's main thesis that “aesthetic surgery is a form of psychotherapy” (p. xi) is a continuation of the focus of his previous books, The Jew's Body (1991) and Freud, Race and Gender (1993). For the purpose of this book, aesthetic surgery is defined as “those surgical interventions that claim that the acquisition of an idealized or imagined body type or physiognomy is a ‘cure’ for ‘unhappiness’” (p. 24). Gilman sees the aim of these interventions, which parallel the rise of both clinical psychiatry and psychoanalysis, as the attempt to “heal the psyche” (p. 25), a form of “somatopsychological therapy” (p. 55). For aesthetic or cosmetic surgery, which we can—although Gilman tends not to—differentiate from reconstructive surgery, the desire is to alter the self-representation of the person by seeing the “cause” of the problem as a dissonance between the self-representation and the idealized self. He accepts Berndorfer's (1979) claim as a rationale for medical intervention that “it is exclusively the altered or defective form of the pathologically