Dumet, Nathalie <br/><br/>
“Kill a Fetus, Kill a Body”? When Anorexia and Bulimia Tell the Story of Intrauterine Destructiveness 

 -  2013.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> The authors of this article propose to study eating disorders from the point of view of the impact of antenatal experiences, and more specifically the traumatic and destructive experiences occurring in utero. Based on two clinical case studies, the authors show how bulimia and anorexia, far from showing a lack of psychoaffective expression in these young women, could rather represent the embodied and expressive trace of fetal traumas related to maternal destructiveness (real and/or symbolic). Having not been able to be metabolized by the maternal object (or, more generally, by its environment), those traumatic experiences, inherent in the mother-child bonding process, appear to have become traces in the memory of those subjects in the same way they were historically experienced, i.e., on the body and through the senses. In this respect, eating disorders could reiterate and manifest those primitive experiences. It is argued that anorexia and bulimia are not related to a deadly repetition compulsion but to a symbolization compulsion carried out on the body, which is an introduction or premise to any other modality of symbolization or subjectification.