After a severe post-traumatic anorexia, Imane, aged seventeen, started an analytical psychotherapy in an institution, the beginning of was chaotic. A dream featuring a fantasy of ingestion of maternal black milk helped start a mutation. The transfer acted as support to the setting in motion and the elaboration of several identifications with the aggressor.
Archives par mot-clé : Anorexia
WINDELS MARIE : THE PRO-ANA BLOGGERS. INTERNET IDEOLOGISTS OF BEING THIN
A community of young women, known as the pro-ana bloggers, uses the Internet as a forum to exchange their methods of losing weight and to share details of their personal war against food. Their blogs stirred a wave of public sympathy which culminated, in April 2008, with the passing of a new law. We will see that the blogs, while certainly created with the goal of encouraging low weight, are written not so much from the point of view of the young women suffering from cachexia, but of the persons committed to anorexia/bulimia. Through their pro-ana blogging activity they are asking, firstly, for support to fight off the bulimic episodes, and, secondly, for recognition that they belong to a community.
Isabelle Durand-Pilat, Thierry Vincent : anorexia: the connection with knowledge
Female patients suffering from anorexia nervosa often have their own specific way of dealing with learning and knowledge. It is therefore observed that the school or university environment becomes a good place for expression, stage setting and repetition of anorexic symptoms. We shall pinpoint the impasses and the attempts at care-giving on specific occasions in these pathologies where food and school alienation go together.
Stéphane Proïa : disavowal of the feminine and voluntary servitude in female gymnastics
Commercial exploitation of high-level sports added to its ideological role seems to have induced a sort of angelic group blindness. However, the dangers brought on by the worship of organized performance and by the logic of rational productivity are now damaging an ever-younger population. In some sports, anorexic behavior among young athletes has become the norm. The aim of this article is to contribute to the identification of vulnerability factors, whether they be individual (dispositional factors) or context-linked (situational factors), which induce fatal behavior in the adolescent gymnast.
As virile ideology dominates in sporting environments, the refusal of all that is feminine constitutes a crucial paradigm in the drive evolution of the adolescent and her relational environment.
Bernard Brusset : the figure of the anorexic in adolescence
The anorexic figures and illustrates the culture of anti-consumption and individualism, but the fascination it provokes goes well beyond this. It is exploited by television programs for its expressive strength as an enigma, the « golden cage » (Bruch), the mystery and the power of what appears to be choice of rupture with the family, with other adolescents, and with oneself. A heroic and sometimes deadly choice that is perceived as an accusation.
Multiple interpretations of mental anorexia according to some aspect of mores and models communicated by the dominant culture tend to deny its psychopathological specificity. Cultural and family factors, and traumatic events, are cited all the more in cases of minor forms of anorexia, or hysterical anorexia.
The spectacle of this supposedly deliberate choice, that of turning one’s back on the most basic and legitimate satisfactions, in order to risk death through the excesses of restrictive behavior involving more than just food, distracts attention from what psychoanalytical practice has shown: the strength of the anachronic affective demand (which can find a dangerous outlet in cases of bulimia) and of ambivalence in the relationship with the parents, and especially the mother, depending on the background of infanthood. This would explain why we find in the entourage, in proportion to the anxiety anorexia gives rise to, reactions amounting to a disavowal of meaning: there is nothing to understand, it’s a sickness, a brain abnormality. Though anorexics may refuse to be force fed, they do ask to be listened to ; behind the façade of a thin body fetish lies an upset and a demand to be heard.
Muriel Darmon : corporal variations. anorexia through the prism of sociologies of the body
By adopting the particular view offered by the sociology of the body, this article places anorexic attitudes and behaviors back into the social space of the body’s uses and representations. The study of « corporal variations » (according to periods of history, social classes, age groups and gender) allows us to see, behind the anorexic body, a corporal model situated historically and socially, one which is at once contemporary, female, and of middle or upper class origin. In addition, the process of corporal transformation that is in play throughout an anorexic career echoes contemporary representations of corporal malleability. It especially manifests two figures which are, however, opposites : that of a « soft » body, perceived as fluid and able to be modified at will, and that of a « hard » body, which tends to « persevere in its being », and resists all injunction to change.
Dominique Fessaguet : the mysticism of nothing
Food, temptation, body, animality and femininity represent Louise’s abjection. She has started a never-ending quest for the Nothing; nothing in her mouth, nothing in her body. She is following a mystical path: the Nothing that makes her go through a “ dark night ” like St. John of the Cross. Temptations and sins are tests of the soul for the mystic. Louise faces a similar fight against herself on her path to anorexia. How can the modalities of her scenario, wherein hallucinatory satisfaction denies her vital need, be understood ? The primary erogenous masochism, preserver of life, will become destructive masochism. Louise’s regression leads her to a linking/unlinking work and a drive diffusion. The prevalence of sight that comes from the pictogram has promoted access to the mystical path of the Nothing. The Nothing is her attempt to heal, which leads her to her death.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°1, pp. 89-99.
Catherine Chabert : from the act to the stage, psychodrama with adolescents
Starting with a critique of the term « addictive conducts », the author proposes a metapsychological reflection centered upon the repetition compulsion and its effects in adolescence, more precisely in anorexic pathologies. The clinical study of the therapeutic process deployed in psychodrama in the treatment of an adolescent girl with severe anorexia is built around theoretical constructions concerning the dialectic of internal and external perceptions. The essential question is that of the over-investment of external perceptions – of which narcissism is constituted – to the detriment of internal perceptions, which are considered to be intricately tied to the affects that constitute the « raw material » of the transference.
The second part of the article is devoted to analytical psychodrama, its value and its functions in such situations: the fragmentation of the transference, the play of doubles, and the putting into words of affects all offer ways to deal with drive violence, insofar as the method ensures the connection between images and words, when the affects are barred off, imprisoned or even stifled. Thus psychodrama traces the path of the effective experience of breakdown in its twofold aspect, as witness to both early infantile distress and to the loneliness of the Œdipal stage.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°4, pp. 941-957.
Anna Maria Nicolò : one or more anorexia
The author suggests that different psychopathological picture and personality structures can be found under the name of anorexia.
She also discusses anorexic issues in an adult woman analytically treated after the apparent remission of anorexic symptoms and dynamics.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°4, pp. 925-940.
Vincent Dodin : treatments using multi-sensorial mediation
We have developed a psycho-sensorial therapy that we call Multisensorial mediation treatment (SMMS). When dealing with severe forms of anorexia, in which patients seriously abuse their body, we had the idea of offering a particular psychotherapeutic space, in surroundings that are pleasing to the senses, allowing the patient to assume a regressive position that fosters access to childhood memories and archaic psycho-affective impressions. This therapeutic space uses olfactory stimulation by scents chosen during an aromatherapy workshop, combining them with warm enveloping of the body, relaxing music and a dimly lit room. The object of this treatment is help the anorexic patient revisit childhood memories, both pleasant and traumatic, and build a sense of psycho-corporal security which has been lacking until now, within a containing setting.