March 06, 2010
By ERIKA CAPEK
The Brunswick News
Having to live with someone else's face, different from the one a person was born with, was a concept that instantly grabbed the attention of Carla Bluhm, a psychology professor at the College of Coastal Georgia.
She presented a 50-minute paper on the topic during the summer of 2008 at an American Psychological Association conference in San Francisco, setting the stage for the book she would complete a few months later.
Coauthored by one of her students from Duquesne University, Nathan Clendenin, the book "Someone Else's Face in the Mirror: Identity and the New Science of Face Transplants" explores the psychology behind the surgery.
It was published April 2009 by Praeger Publishers.
"This is the only book written on this topic," Bluhm said. "This is a book about identity. For me, the book is highly psychological, but it's also about surgery so it will always be medical."
When working on the book, Bluhm said she stayed in her office all day because she never knew when an idea would come to her. After seeing the book in print - her first - she said she wouldn't have done anything different.
"To see it was totally thrilling," Bluhm said. "It's always inherent and laced with all your anxieties that you felt when you wrote it. You always have a mixed response to your own work."
For the three-month period she spent writing it, Bluhm said she was detached from the rest of the world because she had to concentrate so much.
The book begins with the story of Isabelle Dinoire, the first-ever face transplant recipient in 2005.
Bluhm and Clendenin follow her surgeries and battles with tissue rejection while presenting the psychological effects on a person's identity.
"This is a book anyone could pick up and read," Bluhm said. "It's written for general readership."
Currently, Bluhm, who teaches introduction to psychology as well as human development and adolescent psychology at the college, is doing more research on the effects of others who meet people with face transplants.
"This is uncharted territory," she said. "As more (face transplants) are done, how can we relate the work done to comments and experiences and how culture responds to people with face transplants?"
As for the surgeries themselves, Bluhm has some of her own ideas on where she sees the field expanding.
"I think the future of face transplants is seeking them internationally,"
Bluhm said.
"People will go to China and get a Chinese face. It reopens the discussion about what it means to have the face of another."