A Language of Appetite & the Jewish Woman Who First Heard It
I discovered the work of Hilde Bruch in an odd way. She wrote about eating disorders, none of which I was suffering from. What I was suffering from was the inability to write the first book for which I had contracted. I had never had a problem writing before. But the contract—an oversized document medallioned with translucent watermarks, its pages scrolling on top and bottom like a fairy-tale decree summoned an inner obstacle. I could not compose the pages I’d loved imagining.
Instead I watched The Wizard of Oz and paced my little town of Salem, Massachusetts, inhaling the briny scent of the mud flats that extended for shimmering miles when the tide was out, and which were stippled with tiny holes marking the homes of hidden sea creatures. When the tide was in, which seemed to be almost always, the flats vanished, and there was just a thin dull gritty beach hemming my street. It drew the horizon close. Fall turned into winter. Ice glazed the trees. Still my pages remained blank.
One day, desperate, I went to the library and researched anorexia. I sensed that there was some connection between the constriction I was experiencing and the constriction that afflicted these dwindling girls and women (anorexia affects men, too, but more rarely). The library had six or seven books on eating disorders—a trove—and I borrowed them all. It was Hilde Bruch’s, however, that I returned to over and over, gazing at her kind, clear-eyed face on the back flap, and beginning to understand, through her writing, the origins of my stultifying perfectionism and self-mistrust.
At the time, Bruch was the world’s leading authority on the emotional aspects of anorexia. In The Girl in the Golden Cage, first published in 1978, she described families in which looking good was key. These were frequently prominent families in which financially and educationally privileged daughters felt undeserving of the benefits afforded them. Underlying their guilt was a need to please or caretake the parents, which developed at the cost of the child becoming aware of her own desires. Before the illness, the girls are seen as ideal daughters: cheerful, friendly, hard-working, never causing trouble. The crisis arrives when the daughter must grow into a state of greater independence—sometimes at the onset of puberty or when departing for college. Then she finds herself at a loss, and the strangely reassuring self deprivation begins. Bruch wrote: “[A]norexics struggle against feeling enslaved, exploited, and not being permitted to lead a life of their own. They would rather starve than continue a life of accommodation. In this blind search for a sense of identity and selfhood they will not accept anything that the parents, or the world around them, has to offer.”
One passage in her book especially spoke to me and I read it so many times it was nearly memorized: “The relationship to parents appears superficially to be congenial; actually it is too close, without necessary separation, individuation, and differentiation. This harmony is achieved through excessive conformity on the part of the child, always fitting in, always doing what is expected, and this is attained at the price of not taking active steps toward inner development and autonomy.”
The word “individuation” in particular contained an almost irrational level of mystery. What precisely did it mean? It was like a prism or glitch in my field of vision; at times I could glimpse inside it and at other times only glance around it, as if it had opaque beveled edges. I thought of my relationship with my own mother, with whom I’d been close. She was a fragile, sorrowful woman whom I treasured. It was she who had invited me to Weight Watchers when I was a senior in high school. We used to stroll home together at 9pm along the quiet old slate streets of Riverdale sometimes even with our arms around one another’s waists, the blue leaves of ancient trees hanging overhead, and the slightly acrid, idiosyncratically delectable scent of my mother’s perfume hanging in the air. I savored our talks. My sister was a hellion; my brothers in their own world. It was one of the great pleasures of my life to be close to my mother. I hadn’t understood that it came at a cost.
And what had all this to do with my inability to write the longed-for book? I didn’t want to make a mistake. I didn’t want to mess things up. I was afraid that if I followed my own associative, exploratory approach—the only approach available—I would botch things. I was afraid that I didn’t actually make sense, or good enough sense. A writing contract seemed the very emblem of inner value, and I had long wanted one. But now I wanted to save up its invitation to depart into the pages of my book, to leave it pristine and unsullied by contact with inferior me. I was like those anorexic girls to whom Bruch said “your real problem is that you think you are not good enough. You are afraid of not living up to what you think you are expected to do.”
I recalled too my own bout with restricted eating—had it been anorexia? Watching the numbers plummet on the scale had afforded me a sense of pride. It was the first thing I’d done where I could perceive a direct connection between my action and the result. At college I spent six hours every night in the library. All this ended when I fell in love, and lay with my boyfriend in my bed in the afternoon eating provolone cheese with my fingers, and toast smeared with strawberry jam. Yet although the anorexia stopped, I still felt a certain unworthiness, an inner emptiness that only now could I name.
Hilde Bruch was born in a hamlet in Germany near the Dutch border, the third of seven children, and her earliest education was in a one-room Jewish elementary school. Her father was a successful cattle dealer, cattle dealing being a historically Jewish profession, dating back to when it was one of the few occupations open to German Jews before Napoleon. Hilde was so avid to study and possessed such an extraordinary mind that her family allotted her a bedroom of her own; she was the only child given one.
At the age of sixteen she recognized, in a sentence of Goethe’s, the motto that she lived by: “Damaging truth, I prefer it to advantageous error.” When something didn’t make sense, she often said so outright, even if she was considered impertinent. She would not pacify authority. In 1933, when she was 29 and already a doctor, she fled the antisemitic persecutions of Germany, where Nazis stood outside her office door to intimidate patients from seeing a Jewish physician. She emigrated first to England, and then to New York. She managed to help her mother and several siblings escape. Her eldest brother and his wife and daughter, and other relatives, however, died in the Holocaust.
What is most impressive about Bruch’s work is that she heard with fresh ears the voice of the person masked by the symptom. Although the disease seemed to be about weight, she said, it was really a search for autonomy and self-directed identity. In terms of clinical practice, she felt it counterproductive to tell a patient the meaning of the patient’s actions—to supply interpretations—as most psychoanalysts did. The patient needed to discern her own truths.
Bruch treated the patient as a collaborator, allowing her to be the one to first articulate the discoveries. “I have called this fact-finding treatment approach the constructive use of ignorance,” she wrote. “[A] scientist…is always ready to ask ‘What is there that I do not know?’” She moved to Houston, to teach at Baylor University Medical School. Before arriving, she bought a Rolls-Royce, saying that she wasn’t going to kowtow to Texans in their Cadillacs. She’d had enough of living in a society where her type was considered second-rate. People from all over the United States brought their emaciated children to consult with her, and she helped them.
She helped me, too, as I wandered my Massachusetts town, illuminating with her words why my horizon circled so suffocatingly close. I entered psychotherapy late that winter, and still reread Bruch. And I succeeded in writing my own book and finishing it, and it got published.
Bruch did not let herself be beguiled by the distortions of starving people who claimed not to be hungry, or by the generally accepted approaches to their treatment. She understood the dangers of compliance. She understood how an entire population could go crazy. In the picture I had of her she had gray hair and looked old-fashioned, and she looked as if she could be a relative, one with clear eyes. She taught me that self-acceptance can and must be developed. She reached out a hand to paradoxically overly compliant, iron-willed girls, including me, and helped us enter at last into our own idiosyncratic, independent territory.
Bonnie Friedman is the author of Writing Past Dark (HarperCollins) and the novel Chartreuse, forthcoming from Europa
