Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘fat’ operates on at least three distinct registers that frequently intersect and create productive tension. The most sustained treatment appears in Marion Woodman’s Jungian clinical work, where fat is not merely a physiological datum but a polyvalent psychic symbol: at once a potential womb of transformation and a tomb of arrested development, a somatic expression of the repressed feminine, a defence against masculine aggression, and an embodied carrier of shadow material. Woodman’s central argument — that the fat body must be ‘put in the fire’ symbolically before psychic growth can occur — establishes fat as a liminal substance mediating between conscious and unconscious life. A secondary register, found in Onians and in Beekes’s etymological material, locates fat within archaic Indo-European conceptions of life-substance: sacrificial fat is life-stuff, the omentum offered to gods and dead alike. A third register, represented by Panksepp, Maté, and the nutritional literature, treats adipose tissue metabolically — as regulated energy store, as site of leptin signalling, and as a shared neurochemical substrate linking overeating to addictive processes. Hillman contributes an oblique reference in his alchemical-Platonic discussion of libido as ‘fat grape,’ sensuous dripping of pleasure. The tension between fat as sacred life-substance, fat as symptom of feminine repression, and fat as neurobiological regulator defines the term’s complexity across this library.
the fat body may be both a womb and a tomb… The fat has to be ‘put in the fire’ in order to produce growth. She must face her own shadow in order to find the treasure.
Woodman’s central symbolic thesis: fat is a dual-natured psychic container — potentially generative or lethal — that must undergo alchemical transformation before individuation can proceed.
, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine: a Psychological Study, 1980thesis
the energy in the religious and sexual complexes, both charged with intense feeling tones, was displaced onto food… moved only in the direction of being fat. This second personality threatened to devour the ego.
Woodman argues that fatness can constitute an autonomous ‘second personality’ formed by the displacement of religious and sexual complex-energy onto food, threatening ego integrity.
, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine: a Psychological Study, 1980thesis
putting on weight is more than a simple matter of eating too much… The essential difference lies in the individual’s capacity to metabolize the caloric intake. Behind any metabolic disturbance there may be both physiological and psychological causes.
Woodman establishes that obesity requires a dual-register explanation — metabolic and psychological — resisting reductive dietary accounts.
, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine: a Psychological Study, 1980thesis
Body takes on the projection of the shadow and is experienced as evil. Sexuality therefore becomes evil… Obesity often an expression of defiance towards collective values, especially the cultural emphasis on thinness.
Woodman’s systematic phenomenology of the obese woman’s body-relation maps fat onto shadow-projection, sexual shame, and counter-cultural defiance simultaneously.
, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine: a Psychological Study, 1980supporting
The fat in both cases was the omentum, life-stuff… The life-substance was released from the dead body by the funeral fire, departing in vaporous form.
Onians demonstrates that in archaic Greek and Homeric thought fat is identified with the life-substance itself, offered to gods and dead precisely because it carries vital force.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
the body actually defends the adipose tissue mass… obesity, for some, is a ‘normal’ or ‘ideal’ body composition. These facts are crucial for any therapeutic situation involving obesity.
Woodman introduces set-point physiology to argue that the body’s defence of its adipose mass must inform therapeutic approach, anchoring symbolic work in biological reality.
, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine: a Psychological Study, 1980supporting
‘You’re always going to be a dolt,’ I say to myself. ‘Always a crumb. Nobody will ever love you. Fat, ugly dolt.’ … In the obese woman the body image is distorted.
Clinical testimony illustrates how fat becomes the focal signifier of self-rejection and distorted body image in Woodman’s subjects.
, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine: a Psychological Study, 1980supporting
Naloxone also blocks the comforting effects of fat… eating and drug disorders share a common neuroanatomic and neurochemical basis.
Maté establishes that the comforting neurochemical action of fat is mediated by opioid circuits identical to those implicated in addiction, linking fat to broader reward-system pathology.
, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, 2008supporting
since a high protein and/or high fat diet is often successful when the 1000-calorie-a-day diet has failed, widespread interest has focused on diets that purport to change the body metabolism.
Woodman surveys the metabolic literature on high-fat diets as alternatives to caloric restriction, situating psychological treatment within the context of gluconeogenic mechanisms.
, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine: a Psychological Study, 1980supporting
Ainu [adv.] ‘fat, gleaming’ (ll.)… AL1tUpo<.; ‘fat, gleaming (of oil or unguent), fruitful’… Alno<.; [n.] ‘fat’ (A., S., Arist.) with AL1two’l<’; ‘fatty, oily’.
Beekes traces the Greek lexical field of fat through terms connoting gleam, anointment, and fruitfulness, revealing the archaic semantic overlap between fat, life-force, and luminosity.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting
Animals that do not properly manufacture this protein, such as the genetically mutant ob/ob mice, become grossly obese… other genetic variants… which also become obese, appear to be missing the hypothalamic receptor for this protein.
Panksepp presents the leptin system as the primary molecular pathway linking adipose tissue signalling to hypothalamic regulation of body weight, contextualizing obesity in affective neuroscience.
, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998supporting
overweight people need much more insulin…. Insulin is the primary controller of the fat cell, telling the fat cell, when adequate fuel is present, to take up the fuel and to store it.
Woodman cites endocrinological evidence on insulin’s governance of fat-cell metabolism to ground her psychological study in physiological specificity.
, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine: a Psychological Study, 1980supporting
Libido comes from lips; it means the drippings of pleasure, like honeysuckle from the vine, like the fat grape, like the excitation of lust.
Hillman invokes fat as one image in a cluster of sensuous libido-figures, using ‘the fat grape’ to restore the bodily, Pagan dimension of desire that he argues Jung’s spiritualization of libido obscured.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010aside
For this treatment, as for the wine and fat of Homer, no satisfactory reason seems to have been advanced, and we need not doubt that here too it was originally life-fluid that was thought to be given.
Onians argues that Homeric funerary use of fat, like wine poured on bones, originally carried the intent of restoring life-fluid to the dead, reflecting a broader archaic equation of fat with vitality.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988aside
The body is a magnificently tuned machine, programmed to metabolize carbohydrate, protein, and fat… The hypothalamus… coordinates the action of all the hormones in the body, including those which control appetite.
Woodman introduces basic metabolic physiology — fat as cellular fuel alongside carbohydrate and protein — as the biological substrate underpinning her psychological analysis of obesity.
, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Repressed Feminine: a Psychological Study, 1980aside