title: 'Personality' and anorexia nervosa - the phobic avoidance stance. Its origins and its symptomatology.
abstract: Experience and behaviour in anorexia nervosa is subordinate to the need to achieve and maintain a low body weight in the presence of the impulse, generated by starvation, to forage and ingest, and moreover in the presence of abundant food supplies. The stance is a phobic avoidance one. Normal adult body weight and attendant post-pubertal 'fatness' is feared and avoided through the process of pubertal regression, facilitated primarily by dietary carbohydrate (and fat) avoidance, but otherwise and less effectively by the vomiting/purging syndrome. The maintenance of this stance requires a total commitment of self-control and control of the environment - which are experienced by others as a primary narcissism within the 'patient' and as a tyrannical manipulative attitude to those others.
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000856:Anorexia Nervosa / Q000523:psychology*; D001007:Anxiety / Q000523:psychology; D003193:Compulsive Personality Disorder / Q000523:psychology; D003863:Depression / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007046:Hysteria / Q000523:psychology; D008297:Male; D010551:Personality; D010698:Phobic Disorders / Q000523:psychology; D012043:Regression, Psychology; D012725:Sexual Behavior