The Intersubjective Constitution of Anorexia Nervosa

Abstract

thetician, asserted that literary symbolism and the symbolism that is Freud's, such as they are executed in classical symbolism and normal dreamwork, are only mutilated examples of the symbolizing powers active in nature. Both present an expression that has been arrested too soon. They remain substitutes for a substance or person that desert evolution, syntheses named too quickly, desires uttered too soon. A new poetry and a new psychology that might describe the soul as it is being formed, language in bloom, must give up definite symbols or images learned merely and return to vital impulses and primitive poetry.' We must return to both vital impulses and primitive poetry because primitive and vital impulses are as much integrated into the functions they serve as are high level symbolic behavior and poetics. For this reason separation of primitive and higher levels of behavior can be misleading. From the perspective Bachelard's observations provide, anorexia nervosa can reveal meaningful data about its sufferers and their families whether primitive manifestations of psychopathology or higher level functions present themselves to us. Bachelard's assertion has not been sufficiently heeded by psychoanalysts, clinical psychologists, medical scientists, or biological scientists. Although some feeble attempts have been made to study the zone between self and other, a huge cleavage still exists in the work of scientists. Artificial barriers exist between notions of past and present, conscious and unconscious, surface and deep structures. The greatest of these barriers, between the biological and the psychological, still exists in the minds and works of clinical investigators. Nowhere are these assumptions more