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The Other Side of the Mirror: Marion Woodman’s Legacy of Looking Deeply at Women’s Eating Disorders
By
Published: Sep 30, 2018
Category:
Health and Fitness
GUEST BUTLER LORRAINE KREAHLING is on the planning board of the Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology, a 77-year-old Quaker organization with an interest in Jungian psychology. She has been a frequent contributor to The New York Times, including writing on yoga for the Science Times.
I trained to be a professional dancer for ten years. I thought, as Kate Moss has said, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” But the body I saw daily in the dance studio mirror was never thin enough. My solution was to go on weird diets or quirky fasts, which often ended with a trance-like binge.
Marion Woodman spent her life exploring the mythic, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of women’s relationship to body image and food. And the author and Jungian analyst came to understand a powerful truth: Against the background of an ever-growing weight loss industry — $70.3 billion in 2017 — Marion understood that logic and regimen alone could not conquer the hungry ghost or inner demon of these addictions.
In her best-known book, “Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride,” Marion unraveled our culture’s demands on women’s bodies. From women’s stories, Marion learned how the shiny, god-like perfection projected by runway models and movie stars casts a long, heavy shadow on women, spurring us to run after an unrealistic version of our shape. We spend amazing amounts of energy chasing a train that will never stop at our station. [To buy the paperback of “Addiction to Perfection” from Amazon, click here.]
The first time I heard Marion speak, she told of her near death from anorexia. She had been traveling alone in India. Gravely ill in her hotel room, Marion mustered the strength to drag her body down to the lobby. There on the sofa, she was joined by a heavy, dark-skinned woman who sat uncomfortably close. Instinctively, Marion returned to that sofa the next day, and the next, and so did the large-breasted Earth Mother archetype, whose nearness gave Marion’s emaciated body the warmth it needed to survive.
Marion also spoke of what she’d learned from her analysands about women’s private eating and starvation rituals. Apparently, I wasn’t the only lunatic who went out to buy a stash of cookies and milk, came home, turned off my phone, and ate myself into a stupor.
From women telling the truth, Marion discovered how many feel uncomfortable and uncertain in their bodies. This is where the relationship to the mother comes in. Marion used the pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s theory of mirroring to explain what we may have missed as infants. Holding the baby in her arms, the mother must be able to return the child’s trusting, open gaze with nonjudgmental eyes, those “windows of the soul.” In her mother’s eyes, the child needs to find acceptance of who she is — not who or what the mother wants her to be. Many women with eating disorders have spent their lives in a frenzied dance of submission and paralysis, trying to live up to their mother’s ideal. We also imagine others recognize our physical flaws.
Naturally, our parents’ hopes and dreams are not always bad. It’s simply that what they want for us should not overshadow what needs to grow beyond their ideals. According to Marion, when the nurturing mother uses her sweetness to sweep us into her control, she becomes part of what Jung calls the negative mother complex. Rather than encouraging her daughter’s creative potential, the negative mother freezes hope with her critical gaze.
The negative mother scorns softness and fullness. She casts a dark eye on the round buxom bodies of the current obesity epidemic. The negative mother prefers patriarchal principles to determine value: standards, weights, and measures — like calorie counting and bathroom scales. When women identify too strongly with these values, they can lose a feeling for their feminine side.
This feminine consciousness — an awareness of a slower, more patient and sensual side of being — is what Marion tried to convince women to let themselves experience. When you write out her advice to witness nature — watch insects and birds and how flowers unfold — it sounds nearly comical. But hold her core message: Letting go of the image of the perfect body we want and surrendering to our human imperfection can actually be the beginning of discovering equilibrium — and ironically enough, losing weight.
When I was in the dance world, at night I would go to the refrigerator thinking about what I was not and imagining the chastising voices of my fellow dance students — negative mothers all — saying, “You really shouldn’t be eating more.” After meeting Marion, I began to turn away from the refrigerator and put those voices behind me. To face something unformed inside of me, I saw that I needed loving eyes that reflected my potential not my shortcomings.
Marion taught us that the need to accept our humanness — our less than ideal self in a culture where image and perfection hold so much power — was the way to become free of the addictive cycle. Her authentic presence was an example of the “embodiment” she counseled women to embrace.
Marion died on July 9, a month before her 90th birthday. She will be missed.
BONUS VIDEO
