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Clinicians and researchers have long recognized the existence of eating disorders in very young children, including infants whose mothers have eating disorders. This paper combines reviews of the literature relevant to the study of eating disorders from the perspectives of both research and psychoanalytic theory in order to explore the psychodynamics of the intergenerational transmission of eating-disordered pathology from mother to child. A developmental pathway as well as several mechanisms that illuminate the pathogenesis of the intergenerational transmission of eating disorders are proposed and described. Clinical-observational data from a therapeutic play nursery for mothers with
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 64, ed. Robert A. King, Samuel Abrams, A. Scott Dowling, and Paul M. Brinich (Yale University Press, copyright © 2009 by Robert A. King, Samuel Abrams, A. Scott Dowling, and Paul M. Brinich).
eating disorders and their children are presented, and this material is examined in relation to the proposed psychodynamic pathways of transmission.