Analysis of Narcissistic Features Defined in the Context of Selected Family Factors inWomen with Feeding Disturbances
Abstract
The aim of the paper was to search for differences between women with feeding disturbances and healthy women concerning the parents' educational attitudes and intensity of narcissism, as well as to reveal the dependencies between perception of educational attitudes in patients and their narcissistic features.
168 female subjects were studied who were diagnosed as having feeding disturbances, and 168 healthy ones. The average age of women in both groups (clinical and control ones) was 17.5 years, the average age when the disturbed women developed their illness was 16.2 years, and the average time the illness lasted was 4.1 years. In the study the following psychological tests were used:
The Deneke, Hilgenstock, Muller Narcissism Inventory translated into Polish and edited by Januszewski, on whose basis narcissistic features were defined in the subjects, and the Parent Children Relations Questionnaire compiled by Roe and Siegelman and edited in Polish by Kowalski, used for assessing the subjects' fathers and mothers' educational attitudes.
The results of the statistical analyses were the basis for formulating the following conclusions:
- The educational attitudes that best differentiate women with feeding disturbances from healthy women is their mothers' hostile, rejecting attitude and lack of their fathers' acceptance and support experienced by the subjects.
- Women with feeding disturbances are characterized by a more negative – than in healthy women – attitude towards their own body, greater helplessness, feeling of being worthless, of lack of meaning of life, and a fear of a negative appraisal made by others.
- Their fathers' exacting and rejecting attitude experienced by women with feeding disturbances occurs alongside with an intensified sense of lack of meaning of life, impulsiveness, a negative appraisal of their own bodies, a fear of a negative appraisal made by others, a tendency to escape from reality into daydreaming, and aspiring to self-sufficiency.
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