Bulimia Nervosa

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turns to food almost as a narcotic. A typical binge session consists of consuming high-caloric foods and then vomiting, which "begins as necessary unpleasantness which evolves into a sensual, addictive muscular convulsion" (Chassler, 1998, p.398). According to Freud, bulimia could be explained as a woman's perception of eating as erotic. By blending oral incorporative mechanisms with active oedipal-genital wishes, the woman is reflecting the child's wish to eat and thereby conceive father's baby. He wrote, "Do you know, for instance, why X.Y suffers from hysterical vomiting? Because in phantasy she is pregnant, because she is so insatiable that she cannot put up with not having a baby by her last phantasy lover as well. But she must vomit too, because in that case she will be starved and emaciated, and will lose her beauty and no longer be attractive to anyone. Thus the sense of the symptom is a contradictory pair of wish-fulfillments" (Chassler, 1998, p.401). While Freud's theory seems outlandish, psychoanalytic psychologists do propose that the syndrome seems to be rooted in psychological, social, and biological concepts of female sexuality. They have concluded, "bulimia is interpreted as the simultaneous enactment of conflicting wishes for merger and autonomy" (Chassler, 1998, p.402).
From a social-psychological standpoint, the disproportionate number of women compared to men afflicted by bulimia nervosa implies that the social construction of gender (the ways in which society defines gender, implying that sex is biological, fixed, and unchanging, while gender, or femininity and masculinity, is "done," transient and ever-changing) plays an important part in the etiology of the disorder. It is hypothesized that the risk of developing this disorder depends, in part, on the composition of a woman's gender identity (Klingenspor, 1994, p.407). Being feminine means being attuned to and responsive to the n...