Recovering Persephone: An Archetypal Perspective on the Eating Disorder Experience and Descent-Emergence

Abstract

This autoethnographic inquiry explores the personal passage of adolescent eating disorder onset, recovery, and eventual emergence into a clinician, critiquing the collective neurosis of body objectification, fear of the feminine, and a separation from nature. This study argues that maltreatment of one’s personal body in eating disorders is a cultural complex that parallels modernity’s exploitation of earth, and thus, restoration of health in the individual body is connected to the health of the collective body, i.e. a cultural problem that needs remediation. True to autoethnographic inquiry, this study not only builds a case for societal change, but embodies that change. Archetypal content is an understudied aspect of eating disorder recovery, but food is laden with metaphoric material and thus, a psychological domain that needs attention. This research investigates ways to heal the whole person beyond symptom management, using the Greek myth of the triple goddess Persephone, Demeter, and Hecate to understand the eating disorder experience as an initiatory journey of descent and emergence. The research concludes that Western culture lacks initiation and rite of passage rituals for women at developmental thresholds, particularly those that align with changes in the body such as puberty and menopause. Without formal rites of passage, unconscious rites are undertaken. These subversive rites are not supported by the community, so they hold formidable risk.