ABSTRACT
Researchers and clinicians have a long history of interest in the role that the family-of-origin plays in the development of various psychopathological conditions, including eating disorders. The interest in the potential etiological role of a young woman’s family in the course of an eating disorder extends back over 200 years. In 1789, Naudeau (as cited in Minuchin et al. 1978) suggested that a patient’s mother was the cause of an anorexic woman’s death. Early researchers and clinicians exploring the familial determinants of eating disorders focused upon relationship-based family factors in the pathogenesis of a young woman’s illness. Among the earliest well-developed etiological models grounded in family dynamics were those proposed by Salvador Minuchin (Minuchin et al. 1978) and by Hilda Bruch (1978), both of whom based their models on their clinical experiences in treating young women with anorexia. Minuchin and his colleagues (1978) identied four aspects of family relationships that seemed to differentiate the families of his anorexic patients from other families: (1) enmeshment, whereby family members have difculty separating themselves emotionally and psychologically from one another resulting in a lack of autonomy; (2) rigidity, which is an inexibility of family roles, restricting the ability of the family to adapt as a child develops; (3) overprotectiveness, when families are hypersensitive to potential distress and limit exposure to potential sources of distress, making it difcult for a child to develop adaptive ways of responding to stressors; and (4) lack of conict resolution, which may involve denial of conict or avoidance by not directly dealing with the conict (or inclusion of the child in conict between the parents).
