Love in Ellen West
an unconventional essay
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37067/rpfc.v13i2.1196Keywords:
Ellen West, Anorexia Nervosa, Sexuality, Love, Phenomenological PsychopathologyAbstract
This essay discusses the case of Ellen West, highlighting the relationship between love and anorexia nervosa from the perspective of phenomeno-structural psychopathology. Ellen yearned for love, symbolised by warmth and vitality, but the fear of gaining weight led to food restriction and excessive exercise. The discomforts arising from intersubjectivity shape her lived world, with which she both agrees and disagrees; revealing spatiality in its dialectical dimensions, particularly verticality-horizontality, and requires intercorporeality, which acknowledges the existence of the self as both a subject and an object within the body. Ellen feels overwhelmed by interpersonal relations and objectified, perceived and judged by the gaze of others. Her connection with her lived world was absent of object-bodies, raising the theme of minimal or non-existent sexuality in cases of anorexia nervosa. This case reveals the complex relationship of having a body and being a body in order to navigate intersubjective relations.
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- 2025-05-17 (2)
- 2024-11-12 (1)
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Copyright (c) 2024 Thais de Castro Gazotti
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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