What drives a girl with a developmental history that does not seem to have known relevant traumas or dramas to refusing food to risk losing her life? Why does anorexia arise in the absolute majority of cases in adolescence? And why is it still an almost exclusively female disease? What aspects of family dynamics play an important role in fostering the development of anorexia and other eating disorders? And how much does the broader social context affect it? Why does anorexia, previously a rare disease, become epidemic, in the second half of the seventies in the West? What social conflicts emerged in those years that this psychopathology expresses?
Ugazio’s model of semantic polarities answers these questions and others in:
SEMANTIC POLARITIES AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY IN THE FAMILY
Permitted and Forbidden Stories
by Valeria Ugazio
doi:10.4324/9780203552384
5° capitolo (pp.218-261)
New York: Routledge, 2013