Feminist Object Relations Theory and Eating ‘Disorders’

Abstract

Most psychoanalytic theory draws upon modernist notions of the self and has been criticised for promoting a masculinist view of the world in which women are conceptualised as lacking (Appignanesi & Forrester, 1992; Buhle, 1998). While it might appear that psychoanalysis is incompatible with feminist and/or post-structuralist analysis, it is psychoanalysis’s differing theories of unconscious processes that have appealed to a number of contemporary feminist and/or post-structuralist writers (see, for instance, Chodorow, 1999a; Frosh, 1987; Grosz, 1990; Hollway, 1989). Although this remains a controversial move, feminist and poststructuralist writers have drawn on psychoanalytic theory to mount challenges to psychiatric discourses of women’s embodiment that maintain a dichotomy between normal and abnormal behaviours, and which marry discourses of weight with discourses of morality.2

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