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The predominantly female psychosomatic disorders of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa have long fascinated researchers and clinicians alike. Books abound on symbolic interpretations of eating-disordered women's obsessive self-starvation and ritualistic bingeing and purging of ‘forbidden’ foods. The difficult and sometimes intractable problems these clients and their families present to therapists have been the source of numerous studies on many aspects of interpersonal and intrapersonal functioning in eating disorders. However, little research has been conducted on the unconscious lives of anorexic and bulimic women as revealed by their dreams.
Clinical work with eating-disordered women in an in-hospital programme introduced us to the strikingly flat affect of anorexic patients amidst the overwhelming distress of their relatives, and a seemingly entrenched resistance to giving up the anorexic or bulimic stance even, or more especially, in the face of death. A request for dreams from these patients was well received, and we found them willing to explore their feelings through the medium of dreams, while resisting more direct approaches of therapy. We understood this as an acceptable avenue for connection, within the framework of a perception of dreams as being outside personal issues. Therefore, producing dreams could be a way to establish a relationship with the therapist and have her full attention, without any threat of personal self-disclosure.
We collected fourteen dreams from five patients which contained themes that seemed to represent the psychological traits underlying eating disorders. Since the presence of the psychological traits was largely outside the eating-disordered women's conscious awareness, we understood the dreams as demonstrations of Jung's theory of compensation (Jung 1934; Samuels 1985). There did not appear to be any studies that examined eating-disordered women's dreams from the viewpoint of this important Jungian concept, and only one con