The body owning process in the treatment of anorexia nervosa

After pointing out that over anorexia nervosa too much attention focused on the severity of developmental pathology in infancy and on current family problems seem to blur the developmental perspectives in adolescence, the author examined the course of treatment of an anorexia nervosa patient, a 17-year-old senior high school girl. He showed that with the development of object-relationships, there occurred a disturbance in the sense of body-ownership: the lower half of the body felt fatty, some change occurred that could not be put into words, and a flesh-mantle was seen in a homosexual partner. It was emphasized that the projective cross-identification (the author's term) played an important role in this process.