The Paternal Function in Anorexia Nervosa

Speaker: Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, ABPP, FIPA, CEDS-C

The role of the father, both flesh-and-blood and symbolic, is explored in a subset of families of patients with anorexia nervosa. In these families the mother’s narcissistic investment in her child makes separation-individuation difficult. A factor potentially influencing whether the child goes on to develop anorexia nervosa is the strength of the paternal function, which optimally helps the child learn how to appropriately deploy his aggression in the service of separation-individuation and as a means of developing “the experience of agency”: the phenomenological experience of oneself as having an intentional impact. The role of the paternal function in developing the experience of agency is illuminated by the metaphor of rough-and-tumble play, which encapsulates the kind of experience with early objects that facilitates or forecloses the child’s capacity for experiencing agency. In the families of these patients, the father is frequently described as passive or absent and the paternal function as compromised, which arguably leads the anorexic-to-be to relegate his experience of agency to his body, which he subjugates through omnipotent control.