The Owl was a Bakers Daughter
Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine
by Marion Woodman
ISBN 0-919123-03-1
pages 79-80:
[...] Both girls have idealized father-images -- Margaret because she rejected her father and projected her masculinity onto an Old Testament "Jehovah"; Anne, because she saw her father in festive situations and projected her "real" father onto "an emperor" who scrutinized the dignity with which she accepted punishment from his surrogates. Both were princesses of whom much was required by their mothers who were also worshipping a tyrannical father-image -- a tyrant who loved so long as he was obeyed, and rejected as soon as he was crossed.
Because neither mother was conscious of her own femininity, she was unable to give her daughter an instinctual love of her own body, and thus the feminine ego was split off from the feminine spirit locked in her own Ea.Rth. The terrible sense of being "caged" and longing to smash out is the energy of that rejected feminine pounding on her prison bars, demanding release. As children their energy was naturally directed into learning, but the pressure to be outstanding created a compulsive desire for books, for clarity, for exactness; the oversensitive little girl who needed to cry and be cuddled was left to pine in her body prison. The fantasy world with the father grew into insatiable longing for perfection and truth, reinforced by her hostility to all that was "obscure, instinctive, ambiguous, and unconscious in her own nature". Although she may have felt close to her mother, mother and daughter were both victims of a negative mother complex, and both threatened by the hell of the "chaos of the maternal womb".
The Great Goddess has to be acknowledged at first menstruation.
Without a mother who can instinctively give her
a deep reverence for this mystery,
reverence for the childbirth associated with it,
and reverence for her own body
as the instrument through which Life incarnates,
the daughter reacts with terror.
This terror is in proportion to
the nature and intensity of her father complex, [...]
Sufficient to say here that
her flight from the feminine drives her off the ground
into a craving for perfection, order,
and what Shelley called "the white radiance of Eternity".
This inflation is compensated by the feminine;
which rebels against the air and violently swings back to
concrete Ea.Rth, nature, life, food.
The unthinkable sexual fantasies are also displaced into food,
and for a religious girl,
the complex is further charged by
desire for union with "God"
as an escape from a world with which she cannot cope.
Anne's childhood behaviour was somewhat at variance with the sweet, compliant, considerate attitude of most anorexics. She was something of a rebel from the beginning because of her artistic creativity. She was concerned with "doing everything right and fitting in", but her sense of fun and her honesty burst through that desire and made her seem rebelious. However, the real fire of her rebellion and the uniqueness of her personality she kept hidden, because she "would have alienated everyone". "I was too honest", she said. "I would have made life too hard for myself." When the anorexia did burst out, the full-fledged rebel burst [out] with it.
In The Golden Cage, Hilde Bruch emphasizes that among the members of the anorexic girl's family there is usually a "clinging attachment and a peculiarly intense sharing of ideas and feelings", but the child is not "acknowledged as an individual in her own right". It may be worth considering here that a highly intuitive, highly intelligent child, who has been raised in close intimacy with the parents, may be hypersensitive to all that is going on unconsciously in and out of the home. She may, in fact, be carrying the shadow in almost every situation she enters. If she voices what she feels, she becomes a threat to everyone, [who are unwilling to face their own internal higher truth (unconscious), and / or their own internal feelings (subconscious)], so that she begins to experience herself as a "Cassandra". She learns to keep her mouth shut and articulates her thoughts through her pen in secret. The real personality is in her writing. This may lead to salvation or destruction.
Her natural bent is towards perfection, purification, aesthetics. Her ideal is to remove all the superficial veils until only essence is left. If she fasts, she quickly experiences her hypersensitivity to each of her five senses, and her hyperacuity to her own unconscious [and/or subconscious, and/or the shadow (denied) energies of those around her]. Once she experiences the intensity of fasting and the power in herself which that releases, she may find it "rich to die / To cease upon a midnight with no pain." For her, this is no longer a negation of life, but an active desire for the perfection of death. Any art form -- writing, music, dance -- may become the "deceiving elf" that beckons her. On the other hand, art may be essential to her as a mediator between the two worlds. Being able to express her feelings in some concrete way, especially through creative dance, may help her to contact her own inner life spirit, and help her to feel she has a home on this Ea.Rth and wants to stay a while.