Addiction to Perfection. The Still Unravished Bride. Marion Woodman. Toronto:  Inner City Books, 1982,  204 pp.

A patient who has an eating problem is often as hard to help as the schizophrenic, and indeed with the anorexic there is real danger of losing the patient before analysis has time to cure.

Marion Woodman presents, in Addiction to Perfection, very substantial knowledge as well as her intuitive understanding of the person who has an eating disorder. She describes a person who desires, yet rejects, a life driven toward the goal of perfection that she must starve herself to achieve, or that, conversely, is starving her. One person might attempt to fill up her starved self with food in place of love and armor herself in fat; another might refuse life-sustaining food to attain that perfect image that she imagines society requires for her to be loved; and yet another might first try to incorporate food/love/perfection, then be unable to stomach this murderous love (as when the bulemic vomits her food back up in the face of society).

Woodman explains the urge to overeat in the following passage:

In her preparation for the binge, she thought she was invoking the positive mother; she felt loved, secure, protected, enthroned. But even as in childhood the need for the positive mother was all too often answered by the presence of the negative mother—or a confusion of the two—so in the binge the positive mother actually turns into a witch before the binger's very eyes and in her very stomach. The eucharist begins sacred and ends demonic, thus repeating the child's experience of the mother. (p. 35)

Woodman goes further, talking in terms of food as a substitute for the feelings of love, joy, acceptance, guilt, rejection, as well as being symbolic of the destructive relationship with the mother. There are a million reasons an overeater has for eating, or an anorexic for fasting, or a bulemic for throwing up food. Knowing all these myriad reasons provides a general knowledge necessary