Reflection
A Jungian View of Eating Disorders: Marion Woodman and the Hunger Beneath the Symptom
Most eating disorder treatment focuses, for good reason, on behaviour. The priority is to restore weight, break the cycle of restriction or bingeing, and keep the person safe. That work saves lives. But it can end up treating the symptom as if it were the whole problem.
Jungian and depth psychology starts somewhere else. It asks what the symptom is actually for. The idea is that refusing food, or eating and then making yourself sick, is not senseless self-harm. It is closer to a message. And recovery depends, at least in part, on working out what that message is saying.
Marion Woodman: the body as the vessel of the soul
No one did more to shape this view than Marion Woodman (1928 to 2018), the Canadian Jungian analyst who brought eating disorders into the heart of depth psychology. She knew the territory from the inside. Woodman had anorexia herself, into her forties, before she travelled from Ontario to Zurich to train at the C. G. Jung Institute. Much of her later practice was with women who had anorexia, bulimia or compulsive eating.
Her early books, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter (1980) and Addiction to Perfection (1982), set out an idea that was radical then and still clarifying now. Woodman saw the eating disorder as a breakdown in the relationship between body and psyche, and as a sign of what she called the repressed feminine. In a culture built around control, achievement and perfection, she argued, an older and more embodied way of being had been pushed out of sight. The starving or bingeing body was expressing a hunger that was never really about food. It was about meaning, and about a sense of the sacred that had been buried.
Perfectionism was central to her thinking. The drive to be flawless, to discipline the body into an ideal shape, she saw as a kind of addiction in its own right, a refusal of the messy, instinctive, imperfect business of having a body at all. For Woodman, healing meant coming back to the body. Not as an enemy to be controlled, but as the place where the soul lives, something to inhabit rather than master.
Angelyn Spignesi and the archetypal reading
Woodman was not alone. In Starving Women: A Psychology of Anorexia Nervosa (1983), the archetypal psychologist Angelyn Spignesi, working in the tradition of James Hillman, went straight into the images and language of anorexia. Rather than explain the symptom away, she took it seriously. Spignesi read anorexia partly as an unconscious refusal of a narrow, ready-made feminine role, and of the weight of the Mother archetype that women are so often expected to carry. On this reading the starving body is not only ill. It is saying something about what cannot be lived in the way that has been prescribed.
Anita Johnston: myth, metaphor and the deeper hunger
The depth psychologist Anita Johnston brought the same understanding to a wider audience in Eating in the Light of the Moon, using myth, folktale and metaphor. Trained in Jungian psychology, she has spent her career in a field where few colleagues work this way. Her central point sits closely with Woodman and Spignesi. Disordered eating is usually a symptom of deeper needs, emotional and spiritual, that have gone unmet. And the old stories, read properly, can help a person find their way back to a self the symptom had been protecting.
What the Jungian view offers
These writers build on Jung’s foundations rather than on anything he wrote about eating, because he did not write about it directly. What they take from him is a way of seeing. A symptom carries meaning. The psyche speaks in symbols. And the point of the work is not just to remove the symptom but to understand and integrate what it expresses, the long process Jung called individuation.
None of this replaces clinical care. Weight, medical safety and breaking dangerous patterns matter enormously, and any responsible practitioner deals with them first. But the Jungian view adds something a purely behavioural approach can miss. It treats the person as someone whose suffering means something, and it works with the disconnection underneath, from the body, from feeling, from any sense of purpose, that the eating disorder has been managing.
A note on men
It is worth saying that this whole tradition, Woodman, Spignesi, Johnston, is almost entirely about women and the feminine. That focus was important, and the work it produced is rich. But it has left men with eating disorders largely out of the picture, even though we now know their numbers are far higher than once thought, and even though shame stops many of them from ever asking for help. The questions depth psychology asks, what the symptom is for and what hunger lies beneath it, apply just as much to men. But the shape they take in a man’s psychology deserves attention of its own.
Dr Philippe Jacquet holds a doctorate in male eating disorders and is a Jungian analyst and psychotherapist practising in central London and online. You can read more about his work with eating disorders and with male eating disorders specifically.
