The Psychic Stomach: A Psychoanalytic Approach To Healing Intergenerational Trauma and Body Disturbances

Abstract

This paper explores the intersection of psychoanalytic theory, intergenerational trauma, and diet culture’s pervasive influence on female bodies, with a particular focus on the stomach as a site of psychic and emotional processing. Grounded in feminist psychoanalytic perspectives, it critically examines how societal ideals of thinness - shaped by historical and cultural contexts - inform women’s psychological landscapes, relational patterns, and embodied distress. The central research question guiding this analysis is: How does the intergenerational transmission of trauma and societal body norms influence the psychological and somatic experiences of women with disordered eating? Through an in-depth case study of “Veronica,” a white cisgender female mother navigating disordered eating and complex maternal dynamics, the paper explores enactments, the therapist’s countertransference, and the ways in which internalized fatphobia manifests in the therapeutic space. Building upon psychoanalytic theories of digestion, containment, and affect regulation, the author offers the concept of the “psychic stomach” as a creative reframing of existing psychoanalytic theory to examine how clinicians metabolize and transform clients’ projections, focusing on engaging uncomfortable embodied feelings to work through countertransference and enactments. This work links traditional psychoanalytic understandings of embodiment with contemporary feminist critiques, offering an explanation for understanding the therapeutic dynamic that unfolds when clinicians navigate the intersubjective, sociocultural, feminist, ecological, and relational dimensions of working with women in a diet-centric world.