The unconscious body, and certainly the conscious body, will not tolerate the negative mother
The women I have worked with, and those I have in mind in this book, are conscious enough to make the distinction between appearance and reality.
They are grappling with their ambivalent feelings having been in analysis from one to three years.
In the world they function efficiently, many in highly responsible professional positions.
They have some understanding of the matriarchal dynamics behind the food complex.
They are struggling to come to grips with a false Lady Macbeth matriarchal value system in which their own femininity is contaminated by masculine values which the unconscious rightly refuses to accept, even as their body refuses to assimilate the food.
The longer they are the victims of this false value system, the more they come to realize that whatever the outward show of achievement, their lives are increasingly “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
While young women often come into analysis merely to lose weight, the more mature recognize that they must seek out its underlying causes and adjust their conscious values and attitudes accordingly.
They are, as women, locked into a false view of Kingship inherent in the woman possessed by a drive alien to her nature.
Their [those with eating disorders] task is to rescue themselves from a drive that is destroying them.
Food embodies the false values that their own bodies refuse to assimilate, by which I mean that their bodies become edemic, bloated, allergic, or resort to vomiting the poison out.
The unconscious body, and certainly the conscious body, will not tolerate the negative mother. ~Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection, Page 15
