Boys and Their Muscles: The Paternal Object in Muscle Dysmorphia

ABSTRACT This article elaborates the psychodynamics of the paternal object for a subset of patients with muscle dysmorphia. In many cases, there is father-child object relation in which the father maintains his own narcissistic equilibrium by keeping his son small, vulnerable, and weak. Whereas in optimal development the paternal function facilitates the young boy’s separation and individuation, it instead threatens the child with the possibility of remaining forever lost in the archaic mother-child matrix of helplessness and dependency. Faced with this, the child discovers the possibility of idealizing a particular form of masculinity characterized by “bigness” and impermeability that the paternal function comes to represent. The developing boy, his mind’s ability to represent and symbolize the affects evoked by this traumatic theme compromised, takes muscularity as a symbolic equation for masculinity and engages in a frantic drive for muscularity to keep experiences of weakness, vulnerability, and shame, associated with femininity, at bay. These dynamics are illustrated with a clinical case.