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Eating Disorders 14, 287-304, 2006
Clinical features have low predictive value for the outcome of eating disorders. This study focuses on the possible predictive value of gender ideals. Data was from adolescent girls thoroughly assessed both at presentation and at a three-year follow up. Few variables differed between the outcome groups. However, perceptions of gender ideals, as measured by the Three Questions of Ideals, were found to contribute to the prediction of outcome. A discriminant analysis showed that gender ideals, maturity fears, sexual debut and vomiting were significant discriminators in a set of factors, which correctly classified the outcome for 75.3% of the sample.
International Forum of Psychoanalysis 15, 70-80, 2006
This paper explores the unconscious roots of women's ambition from an object relations, developmental and hermeneutic perspective. Three high-profile women's stories illustrate the formative and deformative power of narration: those of Hilary Clinton, Tina Turner and the heroine of Phantom of the Opera. Each narrative reveals typical deformative constrictions to the expression of female ambition, including male abrogation of female capability and the denigration of ambition as unfeminine. Through clinical vignettes, this paper explores dynamic, developmental and cultural forces that block female ambition's full flowering. Part of the need to keep women's ambition limited stems from the unconscious needs of the masculine psyche for superiority. This is communicated to little girls through their mothers' internalized parental imagos, including their mothers' identification with their mothers and their own oedipal struggles. Similarly, the father's unconscious anxieties