ABSTRACT
This paper focuses on the treatment of an adolescent girl who suffered a brief episode of anorexia nervosa from which she eventually recovered. I suggest that this recovery took place, in part, because our psychotherapeutic work made room for the ghosts that haunted her from her parents’ and grandparents’ generations. It became clear that she had not fully integrated these traumatic family narratives and once in adolescence, these buried traumas led to an emotional and medical crisis for her. Many analysts have wondered how the ghosts of trauma past can be transmitted through generations. In this paper I explore the psychoanalytic theories of transgenerational transmission of trauma and how such trauma may manifest in eating-disordered symptomatology.
