Paper Session C

9. The Subjugation of the Body in Eating Disorders:
A Particularly Female Solution

Self Psychology Page | 23rd Conference Program

Overview

While self psychologists agree that eating disorders serve essential self-regulating functions, they have not adequately explained why these disorders necessarily involve ruthless attacks on the body. Object relations theorists have explained it in terms of the eating disordered patient’s equation of the body and the bad maternal object. I argue that it is clinically more useful to conceptualize the attacks on the body as an attempt to subjugate the needy self rather than the maternal object.

I also address the question of why females are so much more likely to develop eating disorders than men. I argue that while men are more likely to split-off , project and experience the needy self as residing in the Other, women are more likely to experience the needy self in the Body. Thus, men are more likely to subjugate the Other, while women are more likely to tyrannize their bodies to contain experiences of intolerable dependency.

The above issues will be illustrated in the case of Bonnie, who led off treatment with a severe example of bodily subjugation. Bonnie’s relational needs first appeared via a bodily enactment, then slowly became "desomaticized" and finally experienced in relation to me.

Self Psychology Page | 23rd Conference Program