Psychosomatic Medicine 32:201-208 (1970)
© 1970 American Psychosomatic Society

The Mother-Daughter Relationship in Anorexia Nervosa

¹ Department of Psychiatry, The Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, New York, NY

Address for reprint requests: Dr. R. Ehrensing, 1032 Eleanore St, New Orleans, La 70115

The unusual occurrence of anorexia nervosa in both a mother and her daughter, both admitted to our inpatient service 24 years apart, is reported. The detailed data support the hypothesis derived from an ongoing study of patients and their mothers that anorexia nervosa results from disturbed ego and psychosexual development beginning with the earliest mother-daughter relationship and continuing in each subsequent phase of development. The clinical picture of anorexia nervosa develops as a regressive resolution of a maturational crisis in which the girl, confronted with the second individuation of adolescence and threatened by the loss of family dependencies, regresses sharply to primitive forms of identification with the mother and to the intense craving for the primitive feeding experience of the mother. This bulimic urge is seen as basic to the syndrome; the motives for its denial are discussed.