This article offers some insights about the establishment of a novel treatment setting for obese girls, which uses the mediation of the body and in which both individual and group issues were played out. This holistic approach combining the somatic and the psychic, emphasizes the way the group supports the containment function in these girls who present an unconscious image of a disordered body.
The analysis of the transference and counter-transference of an obese woman’s therapy leads to an understanding of the role of a traumatic pubertaire event in the constitution of a bulimic symptom during the adolescence. Dead ends imposed by this experience, a deferred action effect of the infantile, block the pacifying possibility of repression and lead to a reversal/turning round of the drive. This drive fate organizes a melancholic form of the primal scene in which the subject is guilty. It is then the body, as support of the ego and of the incorporated object that is to be attacked and protected. Force-feeding, as a centripetal movement from outside towards inside, appears as a way of opposing a fantasy of emptying and potential seduction represented by menstrual bleeding.
Adolescence, 2008, T. 26, n°4, pp. 977-989.
Revue semestrielle de psychanalyse, psychopathologie et sciences humaines, indexée AERES au listing PsycINFO publiée avec le concours du Centre National du Livre et de l’Université de Paris Diderot Paris 7