ABSTRACT
Chapter Four, missing links, offers the “psychoneurobiological” rationale for the author’s theory of the early origins of the perseverant personality and the cyclical eating disorders that are embedded within it. Integrating psychoanalytic metaphor, brain and infant-developmental research, and her own clinical experience, the author details the process that led her to conclude that “when misattunement occurs simultaneously with the instinctual process of food-seeking, reaching for emotional connection via the feeding remains encoded in implicit memory as the brain’s (limbic system') automatic ‘go to’ solution in the face of overwhelming emotional experience.” The chapter follows the spiraling effect such a course of development can have on childhood and adolescence, showing how what begins as persistence and perseverance in the effort at finding an emotional ‘thinking’ connection to the (m)other by way of the feeding can become perseveration—an inability to interrupt this early, instinctual pattern even though the longed-for connection can no longer be found in this way. The chapter also illustrates how difficult beginnings can be repaired, emotional connection restored, and hope for intervention and prevention of eating disorders be found.
