What the research asked
Eating disorders in men are treated almost everywhere as a version of the same illness women have. The literature is built on female patients, the diagnostic thresholds were drawn from them, and where a psychological account is offered at all, it reaches for the mother.
This study asked a different question: what does the father have to do with it?
Specifically, how the father-son relationship shapes a man’s relationship with his own body and with food, and how that relationship shows up in the consulting room — not as history the patient reports, but as something enacted in the room between analyst and patient.
Why
Two reasons, one professional and one not.
The professional one is a gap. There was no existing literature or theory on male eating disorders written from the perspective of analytical psychology. Research on eating disorders is largely divided by discipline — biological, behavioural, nutritional — and none of it examined the father. Meanwhile between 10 and 25% of eating disorders occur in males, and community evidence indicates rates in men are rising faster than in women, with no difference in clinical severity between the sexes. NICE guidance offers no male-specific treatment; the interventions are those designed for women.
The other reason is that I had an eating disorder myself, along with other addictions. When I came out of it I trained, and I have spent over two decades since following men with these presentations — often high-functioning, professionally driven, entirely preoccupied with their bodies, and unlikely to be identified by anyone as having an eating disorder at all.
How it was done
This was a clinical doctorate: qualitative, and grounded in real clinical material rather than in a survey.
The method follows Hinshelwood’s single-case study approach, which treats the consulting room as something close to laboratory conditions and allows psychoanalytic propositions to be tested against clinical evidence rather than asserted. A conceptual framework was built first, then operationalised — turned into specific, observable criteria — so that its presence or absence in a session could be established rather than assumed.
It was tested against past clinical notes from three research patients: white heterosexual men between 30 and 50, presenting with bulimia or overeating. For each, material was taken from the beginning of the work, from the middle, and from the most recent period, so that the whole arc of a therapy could be examined rather than a convenient extract.
The research was co-supervised by Dr David Henderson and Dr Deborah L. S. in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, and received ethical approval through the University of Essex. It was conducted under the standards of the International Association for Analytical Psychology. All identities were anonymised and presenting details altered.
What came out of it
Three things, which are described elsewhere on this site in more detail:
The Male Eating Disorder Matrix — a clinical framework built around four positions that recur in this work, operationalised as shame, identification and blueprint for development, the father figure, and power struggle. It is a way of reading what is happening in the room, not a diagnostic instrument.
The Kronos Complex — a name for a particular father-son dynamic and what it does to a son’s relationship with his own body.
Body Number 2 — the imaginary body a man believes his life depends on reaching, and its relation to the body he actually has.
The finding, stated plainly: a great deal of the unconscious dynamic belonging to the father-son relationship takes place in the consulting room, in the transference and countertransference, and the father plays a significant part in the development of a son’s relationship with his body and with food.
What it changes in practice
If this is right, then treating a man’s eating disorder as a smaller version of a woman’s will miss most of what is driving it. The material is not primarily about food, weight or control in the way the standard account assumes, and it will not usually be brought to you as a story about a father. It arrives in the room, in what happens between two people, and it has to be recognised there.
That is what the Matrix is for. It is an attempt to make something recognisable that most clinicians are seeing and not naming.
Further work
The study is deliberately limited: three patients, one analyst, one consulting room. It establishes a framework and demonstrates it, and it does not claim more than that. The proposed next stage is to test it more widely — interviews with analysts working with these patients, and a wider data-gathering process to extend and challenge the framework rather than confirm it.
Citation
Jacquet, P. (2025). The devouring Kronos: the impact of father-son relationships on the son’s relationship with food and the body in the Jungian consulting room. Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctorate in Analytical Psychology, Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex. DOI: 10.5526/ERR-00042825
The full thesis is currently under embargo at the University of Essex, so the DOI is the citable record. The repository entry holds the formal metadata.
Researcher identifiers: ORCID 0009-0002-3578-6579 · Google Scholar
Please note that several other researchers publish under the name Philippe Jacquet, in particle physics, molecular biology, surface coatings and endocrinology. The ORCID above is the reliable identifier for this work.
Dr Philippe Jacquet is a UKCP registered psychotherapist, Jungian analyst and HCPC registered art psychotherapist. He works with eating disorders in central London and internationally by video, and with men in particular.