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Although “La Faim Et Le Corps” (“Hunger and the Body”) was published as long ago as 1972, our attention can still usefully be drawn to this work of some of our colleagues in France. Dr. and Mme. Kestemberg and Mme. Decobert have presented an explorative and moving account of psychotherapy and psychodrama with anorexic adolescents.
Reading the book, one lives through some of the authors’ discoveries and some of their anxieties and bewilderments. The book itself is a kind of journey. The writing is lively and especially apt and vivid when clinical material is described and where the typical anorexic is characterised. “There is a secret megalomania constantly agitating in the shadow of a pitiable, neglected body, whose pleasure is concentrated in the speechless drunkenness of hunger, sought and found and ramified in the vertigo of domination of the beast by his rider; anyone who through their maladroit attention thinks that they speak to the rider, the cavalier, is heard as only being interested in the beast”.
As is well known, anorexia commonly appears in adolescence when sexual development would normally bring into focus the parental relationship. It appears that the anorexic cannot tolerate an awareness of the Parents' sexual identities and sexual relationship. This implies separateness and lack of omnipotent control on the part of the adolescent, who until now has lived on a false basis. Winnicott is referred to here. Compliance, comparative success, hidden stubborness which can pass for strength, have been the child's way of concealing a strongly fused relationship with mother, involving projective identification. This fusion is thought to be caused by a peculiarity in the infantile relationship with the mother, who was unable to experience her child except as a part of herself. Hence both control and physical contact would be experienced by the infant as unsafe; he would experience the mother as all too easily entered, excited and controlled.
The mother's “narcissis