The author considers that the difficulties the adolescent girl encounters on her way to becoming a woman are grave symptomatic manifestations of a process of becoming a woman which may be common to all female children. The future anorexic would already be established when a little girl, a system of false-self which reaches a crisis point at puberty. Anorexia, a counter-evolutionary process which entails a risk of psychical and physical death, is a form of psychopathology that also masks an unconscious desire for emancipation and subjectivation.

Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°4, pp. 959-975.