ABSTRACT
This chapter considers contemporary accounts that locate the origins of anorexia in intrusion or impingement of one sort or other. It suggests that what is actually being observed and described is an internal situation, an intrusive object, instated in the mind of the patient, which may or may not have antecedents in actual external experiences of intrusion. The chapter looks at ways in which the very nature of femininity—the biological and psychological given of femaleness—might lend itself to fears and phantasies of intrusion. It proposes that the intrusive internal object so prevalent in anorexia is often linked to intrusive aspects of the patient’s psychopathology and, in particular, her intrusiveness towards her parents and their relationship. The chapter suggests that a failure to internalize the two parents and the link between them leads to a concreteness in thinking, a difficulty in symbolization, in which aspects of the maternal function are equated with food and are renounced.
