The Hungry Self: Women, Eating, Identity

by Kim Chernin

From front An inspired psychoanalytic meditation on contemporary female identity and eating disorders. Phyllis Chesler

Genres: Psychology, Feminism, Nonfiction, Womens, Health, Food, Research

214 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Kim Chernin (born May 7, 1940, Bronx, New York) is an American fiction and nonfiction writer, feminist, poet, and memoirist. She has published fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Claire B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty phenomenal read, fascinating for anybody in or near an eating disorder. Just recently finished this one and let me assure you, I had to read some sentences or paragraphs four or five times because I just needed to eat this shit up. NO PUN INTENDED. I absorbed this book and its messages. Very valuable information, but will take a while to digest.

So, she "blames" the mothers. But not really.
She blames generations of feminism. But not really.
She blames ....wait, she isn't blaming shit. She is explaining one of the most complex issues of our society in an intelligent and meaningful way. Pull up a chair and listen closely.

The best part is, and why I learned so much and why this is a winner, Kim CHernin gets women. She gets what makes us tick. She gets what motivates us. She gets why we do what we do when we do it. This book spoke to mothers and daughters. The book spoke the damn truth about mothers and daughters. And sisters. This book messaged my brain and comforted my confusion and pain I have due growing up under two sisters with eating disorders.

This book was damn inspiring too. Because at the root of this disease is the desire to overcome the body and its limitations. Its about the desire to grow and be loved and to be human. Its about the desire to evolve as a person. Its about the desire of identity and the power claimed in one.

I could on, because this book really hit the nerves in me that lay dormant in me for a while. Good thing that happened because my therapist was really doing it for me recently.

Good news: broke out the art pad and pastels!

[Melanie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too dated and limited in thought to be helpful.

[Sophie L · Rating 4 out of 5]

Women, Eating, Identity--an alternative to the Oedipal theory, retracing our original connections to our mothers, and the difficulties for many women in their efforts at "separation from the mother," and affirming their individual identity, all plainly and painfully expressed through their relationship to food!

[amyleigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book left me broken in the places that needed healing. It opened tender wounds so I could touch them, lovingly, without bruising them more. My only quibble is that it gets a bit too psychoanalytic for me at times.

[Zefyr · Rating 2 out of 5]

A second-wave effort to build on Freudianism in order to explore eating disorders among women. Her basic argument is that eating disorders are the result of mother-daughter conflict enmeshed in a modern problem of daughters diverging from the lives their mothers knew. So it's historically very interesting in a number of ways, including getting at the now commonly accepted idea that eating disorders can be a way of exerting control in one's life when everything else is beyond your control, and including teasing apart examples of people struggling with shifts in feminist thought. And a subset of people with eating disorders might find this very personally relevant. But it's not a generally good informational resource on the topic. It's mostly Chernin extrapolating from particular patients.

So you get some passages that show some fascinating insight, even if dated in their expression and limited by their context:

Women can speak more easily about sexual fantasy and experience than they can about their eating behavior. Indeed, they can more easily speak about almost anything than about their relationship to food. The shame that informed sexual confessions at the turn of this century, when Freud began his pioneering work on the unconscious, in our time burdens the discussion of eating. The women who come to speak with me have frequently had years of therapy and analysis. They have explored hidden sexual fantasies and impressions. They have looked into the locked secrets of childhood, opened the bedroom doors and listened to the confused echoes of muffled sexual sounds. And they have never once told their analyst that every week, or after every juge meal or twice daily, they make use of laxatives or self-induced vomiting to free their body from the taint of food. Often, with surprising ease, a woman will speak about masturbating and recall her mother's response to the discovery that she had become, already as a small child, a sexual being. But rarely will the same woman be able to speak with ease about the greed and desire, the lust and yearning she feels for food. The same female body in which sexual desire is now permitted, this body long since accepted, and often celebrated, for its genital urgings, continues to fill women with alarm because of the desires that take shape in their mouth. Their body as repository of appetite fills them with shame, and they are deprived, therefore, of the meanings stored in their everyday experience of food and eating. They are unable to make metaphor and symbol from this fertile experience of daily life. (p 114-115)

And then you have stuff like this, which perhaps sheds a bit more light instead into contemporary transphobia weilded as feminism, using arguments that we still see repackaged in modern transphobic arguments about ftm spectrum folks today:

Our obsession with losing weight and keeping ourselves small, our determination to remake the female body so that it suits masculine attire [found in current women's fashion trends], our retreat into the masculine exterior disguise, our desperate eating of large amounts of food, our starvation of ourselves, our forced purges and evacuations of the food we take into ourselves -- they all express the immense burden of female self-development. Eating disorders express our uncertaintes, our buried anguish, our unconfessed confusion of identity. So far, in our struggle for liberation, we have become women dressed in male attire and not yet, by any means, women clothed in the full potential of female being.

For there is, in our resistance to being female, something far more disturbing than the penis envy Freud suggested, far less biologically determined and far more culturally imposed -- something that every woman faces when she seeks her own development and that no man must ever face. Indeed, the problem with female identity that most troubles us, and that is most disguised by our preoccupation with eating and body-size and clothes, has a great deal to do with being a daughter and knowing that one's life as a woman must inevitably reflect on the life of one's mother. This is the anxiety that makes us yearn to wear male clothes, regardless of fit, and to work over and worry at and reshape these female bodies of ours so that they can help us pretend we have managed to escape from being our mothers' daughters and have, in appearance at least, become their sons. Our mothers' sons -- those being for whom self-development and the struggle for identity are an entirely legitimate enterprise. (p 36-37)

And so it's not that surprising when these ideas spiral off into stuff like this argument that eating disorders are what happens when a woman comes to conflate food with her mother:

An eating obsession comes into existence so that the need, rage, and violence of the mother/daughter bond can be played out in a symbolic form that spares the mother...Most women afflicted with an obsessive need to diet and eat are aware that an eating disorder contains the following seven elements: (1) an intense and driven need for food; (2) a fear about the size of an appetite; (3) a dread of eating; (4) a sense of shame about the act of eating; (5) a conspicuous feeling of guilt; (6) a dread of the body growing fat; (7) a need to diet or purge and starve...if we want to understand the way [these elements] work for a woman in severe conflict about mother-separation and mother-surpassing, we have to translate these obsessive preoccupations into their original meaning.

(1) At the most general level we can say that in an eating obsession food has taken the place of the mother. We are now in a position to understand this symbolic equation since we have seen how the mother was, to the small infant, inseparable from food.

(2) Inevitably, then, given the filial story we have just uncovered, we would associate the fear of appetite with a woman's fear of her needs in general but more specifically with the rage that comes to expression through the mouth. For the woman in the grips of an obsessive need to eat, fear of hunger is a fear of experiencing the hidden violence in the mother/daughter bond.

(3) Similarly, we can now see that the woman's dread of eating is the form through which she experiences her dread of enacting the rage that comes to expression through her hunger. This equation also would seem easy to understand because the infant's early oral aggression was expressed during the act of eating -- both in fantasy and in the reality of infantile sucking and biting at the mother's breast.

(4) Consequently, the shame the woman feels about her eating, which drives her to eat in secret, reveals that her unconscious sense of what she is doing as she eats is to reenact the old fantasy of taking in vital substance from her mother and damanging her through the aggressive force of her need and frustration...

(5) And now, of course, we can understand her guilt when she compuslively devours far more food than her biological needs require. In her emotional experience, as she eats, the act of eating has become an act of violence against the mother, whom she fears she is simultaneously incorporating and damaging all over again at this moment of her life when she longs to be free from her but feels too guilty to be able to break away from the old bond.

(6) Thus, we can see also how her dread of her body growing fat is her fear that this guilty and shameful cannibalistic behavior will become apparent in her flesh; and that, through her fat body, she will be known and recognized for this reenacted primal crime...

(7) And so, finally, we realize that her dieting and starvation and purging and reduction of her female body are all ways of undoing this primal crime that haunts and obsesses her. Through her diet she renounces her longing for food and for her mother; she proves her control over her oral aggression; she makes a sacrifice of her sensual appetites; she gives herself a slender, "pure" body to take the place of the fat, "guilty"one and is thus enabled to punish herself, through her hunger and starvation, for the crime of devouring her mother. (p 131-133)

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

all the other reviews of this book were also relevant to how i felt about it; i think it has so many ideas that are so unconscious that the book takes awhile to digest and find the parts that are applicable to your life. I will read this again at some point.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting theories but lord does she beat you over the head with them.. I think she might have really hit on something huge with the broader scope of her theories behind the prevalence of eating disorders in women, so much so I had a hard time sleeping the first few nights I started this book because my brain was churning too much to sleep after reading it; but it was hard to get through the entire book with how bored I was by the repetition.

[Cameryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Incredibly dated and leans a little too heavily into Freudian theory, which is... alarming..
I am cutting this book some slack because the author offers some very crucial and solid points throughout the essay, however, at times it becomes repetitive. (And, to be fair, this book is a think piece of it's time, it had no ambition to surpass that, it seems.)

[Ella Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book explains the root of why women develop eating disorders. Kim Chernin explains how it stems from the daughter's relationship with her mother. guilt from her mother and societal gender norms play large factors in equation. throughout the book Chernin uses examples of how the daughter uses food as not only a symbolic escape, but also a instinctual primitive escape for her lack of identity

[boat_tiger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting...especially the correlations made between eating disorders and the relationships between mothers and daughters. Worth reading although the author's writing style left something to be desired, in my opinion.

[Tré · Rating 4 out of 5]

So interesting. Will definitely have to read a second and third time.

[Janet Holt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rating: 5

[laurel.e]

Some very interesting theories that could be expanded upon to include different cultures, religions, traditions, women of color, etc., A bit too Ameri-centric at times.

[Gabriella · Rating 2 out of 5]

An extremely well-written book, now a classic on eating disorders, exploring the theme of eating disorders as a disorder of self. The relationship between identity and eating is a complex yet compelling one, and the author does a beautiful job of illustrating all the ways that this connection exists, and what the role of culture is.

[Victoria Horochowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an informative book. I related to a lot of it but not all, which is expected. It was pretty wordy and I felt like it over explained some concepts but over all I learned a few things so I'm happy with it. Definitely a bit dated but I got the gist of it.

[Jodi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dated but had some interesting points. Hated all the "mother-blaming" going on in the book. Back to the free shelf at the library with this book.