Finding Never Land: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Anorexia Nervosa
Tiffany Celeste Lum Wansee
English 638
Seminar in Critical Approaches to Literature
Steven Wexler
Spring 2010
Midterm Paper
Tiffany Celeste Lum Wansee
English 638
Seminar in Critical Approaches to Literature
Steven Wexler
Spring 2010
Midterm Paper
Introduction
We can apply Freud’s Psychoanalytic approach to anorexia nervosa, the mental illness with the highest mortality rate. The term was established in 1873 by Sir William Gull, a physician of Queen Victoria. Anorexia dates back further to such notable people as Mary, Queen of Scots and the first recorded death of anorexia by a Roman woman in 383 A.D. In his book, Holy Anorexia, Bell asserts that there have been 261 cases of anorexia between 1206 and 1934, many elevated to sainthood (Bemporad On-line). But it was in the 1960’s, starting with Twiggy Lawson, when anorexia would soon become a household term.
Anorexia is a social condition on the rise, however an inevitable one stemming from the psyche too. It is about taking control when feeling powerless, the body being the greatest tool in coming to grips with the mind.
Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development
The Oral Stage:
One can argue that anorexics have unresolved issues with food because of a lapse in the oral stage. Perhaps the mother doesn’t breastfeed and bond with the baby sufficiently or the baby isn’t able to assume its independence in the feeding process.
Because there are problems in the baby’s feeding during the first months of nourishment via the mouth, the baby becomes conflicted over this natural phenomenon of eating. When the baby is not given the breast regularly, the baby feels like it is not worthy of sustenance, that starvation is a means of survival and the only way to earn the mother’s love. Love is associated with refusing food and breast milk, denying the body of what it needs.
The baby is helpless in feeding itself. It needs the care of its mother. If the mother is an absent caretaker and neglects feeding the baby when it cries out, the baby will be stuck in this helpless, powerless state, and in adulthood will cry out for a mother’s love and care by starving, trying desperately to get the mother’s attention, hoping the mother will do what she has not done before—force feed her grown child via tubes, doctors, and pleas of desperation. To the anorexic, not eating is a relentless tug-of-war with the mother, a kind of in-your-face spectacle, saying, “Look what you’ve done to me, Mother! You’ve castrated me! Now I’m going to do the same!” More on this shortly.
The Anal Stage:
One thing anorexics are concerned with is excretion—defecation. The greatest control they have over their bodies is controlling what goes in and out, expelling the waste matter within—heavy, weighing toxins.
Anorexics are avoidance people with constipation of the soul. They starve and purge, because they can’t shit out years of suppressing their pain and feelings. Their tenseness and sparse nutrition also lead to bodily constipation which then leads to anxiety about maintaining control over their bowels, maintaining control over their shrinking existence.
An anorexic fills her soul by emptying her body, the most satisfying exit—her anus. There is an interplay between mouth and anus. The anorexic, powerless because of an unfulfilled childhood, only knows her mouth and anus as the two focal points in her life. Whether she is throwing up or downing laxatives, she is in control; she is her own master, dictating the landscape of her digestive tract.
Because the anorexic is unfit to give birth and nurture a child, the anorexic like men who lack a womb, gravitates towards killing. If the anorexic can’t create, she can destroy, her most viable weapon her anus. By vomiting and defecating, she is taking delicious, life-giving food and killing it through her digestive system. She is taking all her power to destroy the very thing that empowers and sustains the human race. In this way, she feels powerful. With her anus as the magic wand, she is the Tinkerbell of her universe.
The Phallic Stage:
Anorexics are very troubled by what they put into their mouths, because food resembles a phallus (e.g. hot dogs, bananas, popsicles). Ninety to ninety-five percent of anorexics are women, who when entering the phallic stage will develop penis envy. Because girls never sprout a penis, they rationalize to themselves that a penis is vile and reject all phallic symbols, the most obvious—food.
They come to equate their mouths with their vaginas, associating their taste buds with their clitoris. Just as it feels good to eat, it also feels good to be sexual. But because of the shame that comes with a woman’s budding sexuality, she denies herself of sexual pleasure along with eating, because both activities make her feel disgusting, vile, boorish, indulgent, unattractive, and unlovable.
Now let’s apply the Electra Complex (coined in 1913 by Jung) to anorexia. Anorexic girls feel castrated by their overbearing, controlling, loud-mouthed mothers, so they turn to their fathers for love and affection, because the sexual distance and differences make them feel safe and unthreatened. They are repulsed by their mothers’ fat, womanly, fertile bodies and feel oppressed by the bodies they would have as healthy adults, bodies similar to those of their grotesque mothers. They starve to never become their emasculating, castrating, baby-wielding mothers.
They are “Daddy’s little girl,” wanting to stay youthful and ethereal so their fathers will always love them, hold them, and protect them like delicate, porcelain dolls. Threatened by all women, feeling in competition with all women who resemble their mothers, they will do anything to be the only women in their fathers’ lives.
So often do aging, over-the-hill men like fathers have the wandering eye for younger women. By Daddy cheating on Mommy for a younger hot dish, the girl will do anything to be that hot, young thing, so that a big, strong thing such as her father will always be there and shield her from the dangers of the world. She does not want to be the fat mommy cow that daddy has lost all carnal interest in.
Id, Ego, and Superego
The anorexic avoids satisfying the id, because of her superego, fashioned from society’s unrealistic demands of thinness. There is a constant battle between the id and superego, and because the anorexic is a high-minded, ambitious individual, she will give in to her superego. She strives for ideals beyond her limits. She derives great pleasure from starving her body and not allowing herself to feel pleasure. She confuses hunger with satiety, starving the body with feeding the soul, and in the end, lets her conscience and all of society’s propaganda override her primal needs.
Defense Mechanisms
Regression:
The anorexic cannot deal with her internal turmoil plus the demands of adulthood, so she regresses back to a simpler, more primitive phase of her life where she feels safe and guarded. Because she cannot nurture herself and feels starved of attention as a child, she seeks nurturance and attention by being a defenseless child.
Womanhood is a state of the unknown. Because the anorexic is already insecure, she cannot venture into a world of ambiguities and responsibilities. She wants to be a little girl forever and put growing up on the back burner, because she wants to frolic in a so-called Never Land where there are no battles, no losses, no letdowns, and no evils. She has already seen a hectic, cutthroat world, one that she is not ready to face and deal with, thereby regressing into a child, responsibility passed on to someone else.
Besides the tragedies of life, there are also men to contend with—men with their google-eyed lusting, advances, infidelities, and big, scary genitals. One can argue that in order to escape the damage that men so often bring about, the anorexic is trying to make herself look like a baby, becoming a sexless object rather than someone vulnerable to men’s transgressions. By losing her menstrual cycle (amenorrhea), she stops herself from being a fertile, life-bearing, sexual creature. By shirking a curvaceous, womanly figure, she avoids growing up and becoming a woman who can be hurt. She regresses to being a child to escape her inevitable evolution and the unfolding of her life.
Denial:
The anorexic will lie, cheat, and steal just to feed her illness and cover up her rituals. She is deep in denial, telling herself that she is not sick and emaciated, but rather fat and in need of losing more weight, that she has no control over her condition. Just ask an anorexic if she’s anorexic, you’ll most likely get a “no.” Denial preserves the quest for thinness and allows the anorexic to continue avoiding the real issues. Just ponder how fat people say they never touch a calorie and how skinny people call themselves incorrigible food whores. Food is always a trigger of denial, either way.
Repression:
Usually anorexia develops because of something repressed within. Rather than facing the thing being repressed, the anorexic channels her energy via her anorexia. The anorexic deals with her repressed emotions by eating and purging food which she takes as eating and purging her emotions. The anorexic assumes that by starving her body, her repressed feelings and torment will disappear. She believes in taking her repressed energy and using it to construct the perfect, svelte body.
Reaction Formation:
The anorexic hides her true feelings and ignores body signals by telling herself that she is not hungry, that she does not need to eat. She cannot come to grips with the reality of her condition; she does not want to change, so she tells herself she is the opposite of her nature, every bodily urge.
So often, an anorexic becomes fascinated with nutrition books, cook books, and the food network. All she’ll do is talk about food. Everything revolves around food: cooking and baking for others, eating vicariously through friends and loved ones, binging, and purging.
Some people think anorexia is all about restricting and leaving the fork on the table, but an anorexic will think about eating more than anyone, dreaming about food in her sleep, making a lifestyle of food, and ultimately never reaping the full benefits of eating, always at odds with her greatest lover and enemy.
Deborah Hautzig’s Second Star to the Right
This novel based on Hautzig’s own experiences with anorexia follows the descent of healthy, fourteen-year-old Leslie Hiller into the bowels of an eating disorder. At 5’5 ½,” Leslie goes from 125 pounds to 74 pounds. In the later part of the novel, she spends her time on a psych ward, and never fully recovers, as we are left without resolution on the last page, fully capturing the sad fact that no one recovers completely from an eating disorder.
The title comes from a song in the animated film, Peter Pan, a character referred to countless times in the novel. It’s about finding perfection, Never Land, the Peter Pan Syndrome—staying a child forever in a sort of Disneyland fairytale. The title also stems from the story of Leslie’s Aunt Margolee in the Holocaust who chose to go to the left, the line to die, instead of to the right, the line to live. Leslie chooses, ideally, amidst her personal struggles, to go to the right, but more and more, she feels that is not hers to decide. Her fate seemingly feels like that of a concentration camp prisoner.
So often, anorexics feel two polar opposites battling it out in their minds and bodies. Leslie confesses, “I want to be a skeleton—but I also want to be attractive. I want to die—but I also want to live. I don’t deserve to feel good—but oh, I want to so much!” (Hautzig 149-150).
Conclusion
An anorexic will never fulfill her desires through starvation, though anorexia seems to be her only recourse, the only viable answer. The real solution is too far away, too shapeless and impalpable. And so continues the cycle of destruction that will never completely end. Is there hope for recovery? Yes. Is there hope for a permanent, steadfast recovery? Sadly, no. Being anorexic is an undulating search for happiness, perfection, and the answer to the unanswerable—it is about finding that fictional place of love and serenity—Never Land. Because of unresolved issues in the formative years of life, an anorexic will take on the imagination and illusions of a child and create her own existence with the only power she has left—the strength to battle food.
We can apply Freud’s Psychoanalytic approach to anorexia nervosa, the mental illness with the highest mortality rate. The term was established in 1873 by Sir William Gull, a physician of Queen Victoria. Anorexia dates back further to such notable people as Mary, Queen of Scots and the first recorded death of anorexia by a Roman woman in 383 A.D. In his book, Holy Anorexia, Bell asserts that there have been 261 cases of anorexia between 1206 and 1934, many elevated to sainthood (Bemporad On-line). But it was in the 1960’s, starting with Twiggy Lawson, when anorexia would soon become a household term.
Anorexia is a social condition on the rise, however an inevitable one stemming from the psyche too. It is about taking control when feeling powerless, the body being the greatest tool in coming to grips with the mind.
Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development
The Oral Stage:
One can argue that anorexics have unresolved issues with food because of a lapse in the oral stage. Perhaps the mother doesn’t breastfeed and bond with the baby sufficiently or the baby isn’t able to assume its independence in the feeding process.
Because there are problems in the baby’s feeding during the first months of nourishment via the mouth, the baby becomes conflicted over this natural phenomenon of eating. When the baby is not given the breast regularly, the baby feels like it is not worthy of sustenance, that starvation is a means of survival and the only way to earn the mother’s love. Love is associated with refusing food and breast milk, denying the body of what it needs.
The baby is helpless in feeding itself. It needs the care of its mother. If the mother is an absent caretaker and neglects feeding the baby when it cries out, the baby will be stuck in this helpless, powerless state, and in adulthood will cry out for a mother’s love and care by starving, trying desperately to get the mother’s attention, hoping the mother will do what she has not done before—force feed her grown child via tubes, doctors, and pleas of desperation. To the anorexic, not eating is a relentless tug-of-war with the mother, a kind of in-your-face spectacle, saying, “Look what you’ve done to me, Mother! You’ve castrated me! Now I’m going to do the same!” More on this shortly.
The Anal Stage:
One thing anorexics are concerned with is excretion—defecation. The greatest control they have over their bodies is controlling what goes in and out, expelling the waste matter within—heavy, weighing toxins.
Anorexics are avoidance people with constipation of the soul. They starve and purge, because they can’t shit out years of suppressing their pain and feelings. Their tenseness and sparse nutrition also lead to bodily constipation which then leads to anxiety about maintaining control over their bowels, maintaining control over their shrinking existence.
An anorexic fills her soul by emptying her body, the most satisfying exit—her anus. There is an interplay between mouth and anus. The anorexic, powerless because of an unfulfilled childhood, only knows her mouth and anus as the two focal points in her life. Whether she is throwing up or downing laxatives, she is in control; she is her own master, dictating the landscape of her digestive tract.
Because the anorexic is unfit to give birth and nurture a child, the anorexic like men who lack a womb, gravitates towards killing. If the anorexic can’t create, she can destroy, her most viable weapon her anus. By vomiting and defecating, she is taking delicious, life-giving food and killing it through her digestive system. She is taking all her power to destroy the very thing that empowers and sustains the human race. In this way, she feels powerful. With her anus as the magic wand, she is the Tinkerbell of her universe.
The Phallic Stage:
Anorexics are very troubled by what they put into their mouths, because food resembles a phallus (e.g. hot dogs, bananas, popsicles). Ninety to ninety-five percent of anorexics are women, who when entering the phallic stage will develop penis envy. Because girls never sprout a penis, they rationalize to themselves that a penis is vile and reject all phallic symbols, the most obvious—food.
They come to equate their mouths with their vaginas, associating their taste buds with their clitoris. Just as it feels good to eat, it also feels good to be sexual. But because of the shame that comes with a woman’s budding sexuality, she denies herself of sexual pleasure along with eating, because both activities make her feel disgusting, vile, boorish, indulgent, unattractive, and unlovable.
Now let’s apply the Electra Complex (coined in 1913 by Jung) to anorexia. Anorexic girls feel castrated by their overbearing, controlling, loud-mouthed mothers, so they turn to their fathers for love and affection, because the sexual distance and differences make them feel safe and unthreatened. They are repulsed by their mothers’ fat, womanly, fertile bodies and feel oppressed by the bodies they would have as healthy adults, bodies similar to those of their grotesque mothers. They starve to never become their emasculating, castrating, baby-wielding mothers.
They are “Daddy’s little girl,” wanting to stay youthful and ethereal so their fathers will always love them, hold them, and protect them like delicate, porcelain dolls. Threatened by all women, feeling in competition with all women who resemble their mothers, they will do anything to be the only women in their fathers’ lives.
So often do aging, over-the-hill men like fathers have the wandering eye for younger women. By Daddy cheating on Mommy for a younger hot dish, the girl will do anything to be that hot, young thing, so that a big, strong thing such as her father will always be there and shield her from the dangers of the world. She does not want to be the fat mommy cow that daddy has lost all carnal interest in.
Id, Ego, and Superego
The anorexic avoids satisfying the id, because of her superego, fashioned from society’s unrealistic demands of thinness. There is a constant battle between the id and superego, and because the anorexic is a high-minded, ambitious individual, she will give in to her superego. She strives for ideals beyond her limits. She derives great pleasure from starving her body and not allowing herself to feel pleasure. She confuses hunger with satiety, starving the body with feeding the soul, and in the end, lets her conscience and all of society’s propaganda override her primal needs.
Defense Mechanisms
Regression:
The anorexic cannot deal with her internal turmoil plus the demands of adulthood, so she regresses back to a simpler, more primitive phase of her life where she feels safe and guarded. Because she cannot nurture herself and feels starved of attention as a child, she seeks nurturance and attention by being a defenseless child.
Womanhood is a state of the unknown. Because the anorexic is already insecure, she cannot venture into a world of ambiguities and responsibilities. She wants to be a little girl forever and put growing up on the back burner, because she wants to frolic in a so-called Never Land where there are no battles, no losses, no letdowns, and no evils. She has already seen a hectic, cutthroat world, one that she is not ready to face and deal with, thereby regressing into a child, responsibility passed on to someone else.
Besides the tragedies of life, there are also men to contend with—men with their google-eyed lusting, advances, infidelities, and big, scary genitals. One can argue that in order to escape the damage that men so often bring about, the anorexic is trying to make herself look like a baby, becoming a sexless object rather than someone vulnerable to men’s transgressions. By losing her menstrual cycle (amenorrhea), she stops herself from being a fertile, life-bearing, sexual creature. By shirking a curvaceous, womanly figure, she avoids growing up and becoming a woman who can be hurt. She regresses to being a child to escape her inevitable evolution and the unfolding of her life.
Denial:
The anorexic will lie, cheat, and steal just to feed her illness and cover up her rituals. She is deep in denial, telling herself that she is not sick and emaciated, but rather fat and in need of losing more weight, that she has no control over her condition. Just ask an anorexic if she’s anorexic, you’ll most likely get a “no.” Denial preserves the quest for thinness and allows the anorexic to continue avoiding the real issues. Just ponder how fat people say they never touch a calorie and how skinny people call themselves incorrigible food whores. Food is always a trigger of denial, either way.
Repression:
Usually anorexia develops because of something repressed within. Rather than facing the thing being repressed, the anorexic channels her energy via her anorexia. The anorexic deals with her repressed emotions by eating and purging food which she takes as eating and purging her emotions. The anorexic assumes that by starving her body, her repressed feelings and torment will disappear. She believes in taking her repressed energy and using it to construct the perfect, svelte body.
Reaction Formation:
The anorexic hides her true feelings and ignores body signals by telling herself that she is not hungry, that she does not need to eat. She cannot come to grips with the reality of her condition; she does not want to change, so she tells herself she is the opposite of her nature, every bodily urge.
So often, an anorexic becomes fascinated with nutrition books, cook books, and the food network. All she’ll do is talk about food. Everything revolves around food: cooking and baking for others, eating vicariously through friends and loved ones, binging, and purging.
Some people think anorexia is all about restricting and leaving the fork on the table, but an anorexic will think about eating more than anyone, dreaming about food in her sleep, making a lifestyle of food, and ultimately never reaping the full benefits of eating, always at odds with her greatest lover and enemy.
Deborah Hautzig’s Second Star to the Right
This novel based on Hautzig’s own experiences with anorexia follows the descent of healthy, fourteen-year-old Leslie Hiller into the bowels of an eating disorder. At 5’5 ½,” Leslie goes from 125 pounds to 74 pounds. In the later part of the novel, she spends her time on a psych ward, and never fully recovers, as we are left without resolution on the last page, fully capturing the sad fact that no one recovers completely from an eating disorder.
The title comes from a song in the animated film, Peter Pan, a character referred to countless times in the novel. It’s about finding perfection, Never Land, the Peter Pan Syndrome—staying a child forever in a sort of Disneyland fairytale. The title also stems from the story of Leslie’s Aunt Margolee in the Holocaust who chose to go to the left, the line to die, instead of to the right, the line to live. Leslie chooses, ideally, amidst her personal struggles, to go to the right, but more and more, she feels that is not hers to decide. Her fate seemingly feels like that of a concentration camp prisoner.
So often, anorexics feel two polar opposites battling it out in their minds and bodies. Leslie confesses, “I want to be a skeleton—but I also want to be attractive. I want to die—but I also want to live. I don’t deserve to feel good—but oh, I want to so much!” (Hautzig 149-150).
Conclusion
An anorexic will never fulfill her desires through starvation, though anorexia seems to be her only recourse, the only viable answer. The real solution is too far away, too shapeless and impalpable. And so continues the cycle of destruction that will never completely end. Is there hope for recovery? Yes. Is there hope for a permanent, steadfast recovery? Sadly, no. Being anorexic is an undulating search for happiness, perfection, and the answer to the unanswerable—it is about finding that fictional place of love and serenity—Never Land. Because of unresolved issues in the formative years of life, an anorexic will take on the imagination and illusions of a child and create her own existence with the only power she has left—the strength to battle food.
Annotated Bibliography
Bemporad, Jules R. “The Psychoanalytic Approach to Psychosomatics and Eating
Disorders.” AOL. On-line. 10 March 2010.
Summary: Traces the evolution of anorexia from the Hellenistic Age to starving
saints to the 19th century to the 1960’s when numbers soared.
This text is important, because it gives anorexia a place in history and shows how
the evolution of the world coincides with the evolution of this disease.
Chabert, Catherine, and Jeammet Philippe. “A Psychoanalytic approach to eating
disorders: The role of dependency.” AOL. On-line. 10 March 2010.
Summary: Discusses addiction, erogenous zones, oral sadism, and anal control. This in-depth text is important, because it raises awareness and debate over the
insidious machinations of a misunderstood addiction to and denial of food.
Cherry, Kendra. “Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development.” AOL. On-line. 10
March 2010.
Summary: Overview of Freud’s Oral Stage, Anal Stage, Phallic Stage, Latent
Period, and Genital Stage.
This text is important, because it step by step, takes us through the stages of our
development and explains how unresolved issues in our early life affect the rest
of our future endeavors and behavior.
Hautzig, Deborah. Second Star to the Right. New York: Greenwillow, 1981.
Summary: Fourteen-year-old Leslie Hiller’s abrupt and rapid descent into anorexia nervosa, her avoidance of food, her plunging weight, her relationship with her troubled mother, her shame and animosity towards her Jewish heritage, her strained friendship with loving, concerned, best friend, Cavett, and her stay in a psych ward amidst other anorexics.
This text is important, because it was written at a time before Karen Carpenter’s death when the general public still had little knowledge and awareness of this social disease. It is one of the first books to really illuminate the seriousness of anorexia and so beautifully and candidly reveals the deeper layers.
Kolodny, Nancy J. When Food’s A Foe. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992.
Summary: Discusses self-image, anorexia, bulimia, and ways to seek help, prevent, and overcome an eating disorder.
This text is important, because it very simply, concisely, and candidly introduces the reader to the psychology of eating disorders and informs already E.D. sufferers in such a way as to motivate them to seek help and not take their disease any further. This book perhaps is one of the most straightforward texts out there for young E.D. sufferers.
Bemporad, Jules R. “The Psychoanalytic Approach to Psychosomatics and Eating
Disorders.” AOL. On-line. 10 March 2010.
Summary: Traces the evolution of anorexia from the Hellenistic Age to starving
saints to the 19th century to the 1960’s when numbers soared.
This text is important, because it gives anorexia a place in history and shows how
the evolution of the world coincides with the evolution of this disease.
Chabert, Catherine, and Jeammet Philippe. “A Psychoanalytic approach to eating
disorders: The role of dependency.” AOL. On-line. 10 March 2010.
Summary: Discusses addiction, erogenous zones, oral sadism, and anal control. This in-depth text is important, because it raises awareness and debate over the
insidious machinations of a misunderstood addiction to and denial of food.
Cherry, Kendra. “Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development.” AOL. On-line. 10
March 2010.
Summary: Overview of Freud’s Oral Stage, Anal Stage, Phallic Stage, Latent
Period, and Genital Stage.
This text is important, because it step by step, takes us through the stages of our
development and explains how unresolved issues in our early life affect the rest
of our future endeavors and behavior.
Hautzig, Deborah. Second Star to the Right. New York: Greenwillow, 1981.
Summary: Fourteen-year-old Leslie Hiller’s abrupt and rapid descent into anorexia nervosa, her avoidance of food, her plunging weight, her relationship with her troubled mother, her shame and animosity towards her Jewish heritage, her strained friendship with loving, concerned, best friend, Cavett, and her stay in a psych ward amidst other anorexics.
This text is important, because it was written at a time before Karen Carpenter’s death when the general public still had little knowledge and awareness of this social disease. It is one of the first books to really illuminate the seriousness of anorexia and so beautifully and candidly reveals the deeper layers.
Kolodny, Nancy J. When Food’s A Foe. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992.
Summary: Discusses self-image, anorexia, bulimia, and ways to seek help, prevent, and overcome an eating disorder.
This text is important, because it very simply, concisely, and candidly introduces the reader to the psychology of eating disorders and informs already E.D. sufferers in such a way as to motivate them to seek help and not take their disease any further. This book perhaps is one of the most straightforward texts out there for young E.D. sufferers.
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