[Anorexia nervosa from the aspect of psychoanalysis]

The author demonstrates the possibilities of therapeutic collaboration as regards treatment of anorexia nervosa by combined psychoanalytic and somatic treatment. He demonstrates this collaboration on a particularly severe course of the disease which was successfully reverted. The author indicates briefly the approach of modern psychoanalysis to this remarkable psychosomatic disease. The disease is conceived as the consequence of complete failure of feeding in the widest sense of the word during the period of preverbal childhood, caused by emotionally equivocal behaviour of the mother. This prevents satisfactory definition of the ego and non-ego of the child and interferes with the process of separation. This has then an impact on all further stages of development and the disorder leads to failure during adolescence. The mental anorectic symptomatology is then a persisting unconscious attempt to re-establish the lost unity with the mother which releases fear of the loss of self-limitation.