I am going to explain the concept of “projective objectification” to you. At the same time, I would like to talk about anorexia. Projective objectification is psychological term, where a person attaches meaning to an object that previously had no meaning. This object is subjected to a person’s projection of certain thoughts, feelings, and attachments.
One simple example is a child who projects her mother’s care onto a teddy bear her mother bought her. The tender feelings towards the mother are projected by the child onto the objected. Hence the terms “projective” and “objectification”.
This collective term “projective objectification” has Freudian, Psychodynamic roots. But I will not explain the technicalities here.
I’m going to tell you now about the blueberry muffins in my life.
First of all, some background info. I’m anorexic. I have anorexia nervosa. I had my first episode when I was a teen, age 14. And I had my second episode when I was 37. For me, anorexia recovery is something to work on daily. Like being sober. “It only works if you work it,” so they say. I work it so that am alive and kicking for my kids. Honestly, I am only beginning to do recovery for myself, for of self-love. Writing about the blueberry muffin now is part of the recovery exercise.
My mother used to buy blueberry muffins from a well-known, affordable bakery here in the Philippines. In my childhood, she bought them for me when she was thinking of me, when she wanted to make sure I was fed OK. It is precisely this I am trying to capture when I am buying blueberry muffins now that I am a 40-something year-old adult. When I am out and about doing my family’s grocery shopping.
When I overbuy the blueberry muffins, I am hoarding the love and the care because I felt, feel, am deprived of it—love, care, nourishment.
The love and the care I crave got wrapped around—projectively objectified on—the blueberry muffins.
Not so alien to want love in a muffin, right?
I’ll go a bit deeper here.
When I buy them, I buy my mother’s love and assurance. When I buy them, I buy ANY loved-one’s nurturing care. The “loved one” in question is sometimes my mom, sometimes my husband. It is whoever I want assurance the most, at that time of buying. Over the course of my healing journey, I have come to realize this.
It came to a point when I had eight of them (collected from various affordable bakeries) in the fridge or freezer. I wouldn’t eat them immediately. I would let them sit for weeks, even more than a month.
Why did I do this? Why would anyone buy so many things they let sit and not use, only to use them when they are almost worthless? I sense that I’m not alone here. Maybe I have eight blueberry muffins in my ref, but you have eight make-up kits you don’t use. Or eight shirts or eight pairs of shoes, or eight colorful bags.
The point is: projective objectification. We do it because we are trying to snatch something from the ether: most of the time, it is love and affection.
In my scenario, I’d only eat them, one a day, fearfully. Not wanting to take more than I deserve. I’d skimp on the self-love as much as I skimped on the food/nutrition.
I followed the anorexic credo of not loving myself, because I don’t deserve it. I followed the unconscious lesson I learned from my mother’s pattern of care for me: I only deserve meager love, meager attention.
With the controlled buying-keeping pattern, I am reenacting how love/care was doled out. But this time, I have absolute control. Over the blueberry muffins, and over my life.
Do you do the same too? Because you have control over you bags, or shirts, or shoes, you have control over your life?
Then, you can understand what anorexia is for me. And why I overbuy the blueberry muffins. I hope I have helped you understand the term “projective objectification” in this article. Likewise, I hope I’ve shed light on the predicament of a (typical) person with anorexia.
This is what anorexia and everyday anorexia recovery looks like.
