Borderline Body: The Psychosomatics of Eating Disorders

Abstract

A hermeneutic phenomenological methodology was used to collect data in order to understand and explain eating disorders from a psychosomatic perspective. The following chapters of this dissertation include a comprehensive overview of psychoanalytic literature on psychosomatics and eating disorders, a methodology chapter, a presentation of the findings extrapolated from the literature reviewed, and implications of the findings. The implications of the findings provide evidence that eating disorders are the product of psyche-soma splitting that occurs during infancy when there is not proper maternal investment, instigating a rejection of the foreign body that emerges during puberty. Due to the lack of mind-body integration in infancy, psyche-soma splitting often leads to the emergence of disordered eating and/or psychosomatic illness in adolescence. When the mind and body split in such a way the unmentalized psychic material is forced to split off into the body and the body becomes a theater for psychic material. This psychic material is experienced in the body as borderline states in which the body acts as a moving border to protect against psychic invasion. Healing the psyche-soma split involves experiencing preverbal states through transference and countertransference in analysis and over time transforming preverbal states into language.