(1989). Journal of American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 17:5-27 Self Psychological Reflections on the Origins of Eating Disorders It is the intent of this paper to understand eating disorders as one major form of self pathology in which there has been both “traumatic” and chronic disturbance in the empathic connectedness between parents and child. I will offer the hypothesis that what we see clinically as anorexia and bulimia represent two variations of a defensive structure mobilized to cope with a specific, sudden, and prolonged disruption in the early parent–child relationship (or more accurately, the archaic self–selfobject dimension of the parent–child relationship). Such a massive failure, through its particular disruption of the empathic milieu that maintains the integrity of the child's self, prevents the internalization of certain soothing and tension-regulating structures. It promotes dissociative defenses that become congruent with the more chronic empathic failures that exist (Geist, 1984), although in disparate form, in the families of both anorectic and [This is a summary or excerpt from the full text of the book or article. The full text of the document is available to subscribers.] |
