Do virtual ao real: um estudo psicanalítico sobre anorexia, bulimia e as relações familiares

Abstract

A research about anorexia and bulimia that had its start in the cyberspace and overflowed to the real world, this is the true abstract of what the present paper represents. The research started through a website known as Orkut, where I searched for online communities of anorexic and bulimic girls, and also where I invited them to take part in my research, through an interview using MSN. When I interviewed the young women with eating disorders, I tried to keep as my focus the relationship between the etiology of eating disorders and the family relations. As the research went on, I collected a wide variety of interviews, both of anorexics and bulimics. While I was researching on the internet, I enrolled in an institution that offers psychoanalytic treatment to the youth that suffers from anorexia and bulimia, called CEPPAN, Centro de Estudos e Pesquisas em Psicanálise da Anorexia e Bulimia. Due to CEPPAN and the internet, I was able to achieve clinical experience in cases of anorexia and bulimia. Therefore, my research ended with data that blended clinical experience with a careful statistical analysis of the interviews collected using the internet. The research was successful in confirming some of the major psychoanalytical hypothesis about eating disorders and to offer a new finding, which is the high prevalence of anorexia and bulimia among those which I called the first daughter of the couple, that is, the first woman to be born, regardless of the presence or absence of brothers