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Here's a book with a difference. For years therapists have focused on the material causes of women's eating disorders. Now, in Father Hunger, clinical psychologist Margo Maine tells us of their paternal origin. Not that this has always been overlooked. Freudians initially attributed anorexia to pubertally-revived Oedipal desire for the father against which the anorexic defends by regressing to infantile orality. Subsequently, still attending to orality, analysts have attributed eating disorders to infancy itself, to difficulties in the pre-Oedipal baby's relation with her mother.
Some argue, in Kleinian terms, that anorexia stems from early death-instinct based hatred of the mother resulting in the fantasy of orally incorporating her as a persecuting object within the self; this is exacerbated by puberty which renders girls bodily more similar to the mother against which they may rage by anorexically or bulimically attacking themselves. Others, following Fairbairn, attribute eating disorders to the mother depriving and not meeting her daughter's needs in infancy, against which she defends by internalising her as an exciting and frustrating object to be controlled from within, and against which she may then storm in adolescence as though this maternal object were the same as her body.
Fairbairnians, Kleinians and other object relations analysts disagree whether the baby's instincts or the mother's behaviour are more to blame. They agree, however, that the effect is a fantasy, namely that of orally incorporating the mother. By contrast many US and feminist therapists, influenced by Talcott Parsons' sociological reformulation of psychoanalysis, neglect fantasy in favour of focusing on sex roles instead. Boys, they argue, learn early to become individuated and emotionally distant from others thereby acquiring the instrumentality required of them at work. Girls, on the other hand, retain from early mothering the emotional connection with others necessary to becoming mother