Traumatic influence of the attitude towards one’s own gender as a factor in the development of eating disorders

¹ Don State Technical University, Gagarin Square. 1, 344000 Rostov-on-Don, Russia
² Psychological Safety Center, Zhuravleva st., 344000 Rostov-on-Don, Russia

^* Corresponding author: sirius-gipno@mail.ru

Abstract

At present, the amount of people suffering from various types of eating disorders is steadily increasing all over the world. A large proportion is occupied by people with manifestations of anorexia. Primarily this disorder affects female representatives at the age of 13-20 years. Taking into account the severity of the consequences that anorexia leads to, cases of death are increasingly being recorded, including adolescents. That’s why the question of providing effective assistance to such patients is especially relevant. However, without establishing the true causes, the results achieved during the treatment may be only short-term. In this connection, the author made an attempt to look at the problem more deeply. Thus, the article is devoted to the consideration of the causes of anorexia of adolescent girls, lying in the field of the unconscious, in particular, in a deep psychological trauma received in childhood. According to the author, the reasons of this trauma are the perception as a humiliation of the manifestations of the brother’s admiration or friends’ son from the girl’s parents, as opposed to the lack of attention, warmth and care towards her. The arising misunderstanding of the reason for such a different attitude contributes to the formation of a girl’s confidence that it is better to be a boy and, as a result, an unwillingness to be a woman. This, in turn, leads to anorexic behavior, as anorexia can inhibit the transformation of the body into a woman. The given assessment was confirmed in a conducted study among 128 girls aged 13-18 years with various eating disorders, including 46 with manifestations of anorexia nervosa. The substantiation of the hypothesis put forward at the beginning of the study was checked by means of a statistical method - the Fisher-φ test.