Historical Aspects

Physical attractiveness from an evolutionary perspective is a chief indicator of genetic health. Current evolutionary theory asserts that attractiveness guides the search for a healthy mate. So, physical attractiveness is a driver for sexual selection. Sexual...

Not many people remember the late Dr. Stanley Jourard, but he was probably the first humanistic psychologist to focus on body awareness and body space. He developed the concept of body-cathexis which is the amount of psychic energy (attention) a person places on his or her body and its various areas. The term, body-cathexis, appears to have been replaced by the common technical term of “body awareness.” Jourard died young in 1974, but his short career produced a variety of findings about both-cathexis and its relationship to a person’s own body relationship, their bodily satisfaction or dissatisfaction, attitudes toward the body-self, and gender differences in body experience. Jourard is worth remembering and body-cathexis remains a useful tool in the therapeutic arsenal.

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (c. 80-15 BC) was a Roman architect and engineer made famous by his
massive, De Architectura, a treatise on architecture. He theorized that good building structure should
have strength, utility, and beauty. He also observed that the proportions of the human body possessed
geometric harmony and beauty. The work was then lost for centuries and rediscovered in a Swiss
monastery library in 1414 by Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), a noted humanist from Florence. Vitruvius
designed a Roman temple using the analogy of the proportions of the human body to signify both the
sacred space and the sacredness of its model. Symmetry here is the key aesthetic standard for what
constitutes the beautiful. Pollio’s ideas were then adapted by Leonardo Da Vinci in 1489. He re-
measured the human body to double-check Pollio’s original ratios and found some errors. These studies
resulted in Da Vinci’s own version of the Vitruvian Man. This desire for symmetry is an ancient one and
very much alive today as verified by the numerous studies of physical attraction. Contemporary science
reveals four essential aspects that make a person attractive: facial symmetry, high averageness of facial
shape, sexually dimorphic features, and skin quality.