Abstract

This descriptive, discovery-oriented psychoanalytic study was conducted to determine the nature of the reciprocal intersubjective perceptions and relations between anorexic daughters and their mothers. The data were derived from interviews with three mother-daughter anorexic pairs. ;The praxis from phenomenological psychology was used to assemble the text-data, separate the text into meaning units, transform each meaning unit into psychologically meaningful data, and determine the structure of experience of each subject. The structures of all subjects were collapsed to provide the intersubjective constitution of mother-daughter relationships in anorexia nervosa. Psychoanalytic thinking was used to elaborate the results. ;The findings suggest that the shared subjectivity between mother and daughter should no longer be considered in terms of subject and object. More accurately, the anorexic daughter, her mother, and her mother's mother should be viewed as both subject and object in a three-way relationship. Each of these is an appositive figure, a subject in her own right yet potentially an object representing both self and other. Each may be conduit for an anterior mother and also a perpetrator with projects of her own. ;Psychoanalytic interpretation suggests that deep within mother-daughter transactions there persist prior agenda which include primordial strands of destruction. Anorexia nervosa combines so powerfully with destructive interpersonal relations that destructive wishes and impulses may be injected into an anorexic granddaughter with her mother's complicity. Consequently no individual grows into an individual in her own right, and no individual is emancipated from destructive and intrusive identifications. The anorexic vicariously performs a balancing act, and the result is that she lives a living death. ;The anorexic is a composite figure whose configurative world includes perceiving the other and being in turn perceived as a mask, a face, a mirror, a representation, and a real person. At one and the same time, she stands in place of others, reflects others, and replaces selective others. She is a prosopon for her mother and is perceived as such