The child is not acknowledged as an individual in her own right.
Anne’s childhood behaviour was somewhat at variance with the sweet, compliant, considerate attitude of most anorexics.
She was something of a rebel from the beginning because of her artistic creativity.
She was concerned with “doing everything right and fitting in,” but her sense of fun and her honesty burst through that desire and made her seem rebellious.
However, the real fire of her rebellion and the uniqueness of her personality she kept hidden, because she “would have alienated everyone.”
“I was too honest,” she said. “I would have made life too hard for myself.”
When the anorexia did burst out, the full-fledged rebel burst with it.
In The Golden Cage, Hilde Bruch emphasizes that among the members of the anorexic girl’s family there is usually a “clinging attachment and a peculiarly intense sharing of ideas and feelings,” but the child is not “acknowledged as an individual in her own right.”
It may be worth considering here that a highly intuitive, highly intelligent child, who has been raised in close intimacy with the parents, may be hypersensitive to all that is going on unconsciously in and out of the home.
It may, in fact, be carrying the shadow in almost every situation she enters.
If she voices what she feels, she becomes a threat to everyone, so that she begins to experience herself as a Cassandra.
She learns to keep her mouth shut and articulates her thoughts through her pen in secret.
The real personality is in the writing.
This may lead to salvation or destruction.
Her [an anorexic’s] natural bent is towards perfection, purification, aesthetics.
Her ideal is to remove all the superficial veils until only essence is left. ~Marion Woodman, The Owl was a Baker’s Daughter, Page 80
