Oltre l’insostenibile e impuro peso dell’essere. Una riflessione psicoanalitica sull’anoressia

Abstract

Anorexia, within the spectrum of eating disorders, testifies to an altered relationship between the subject and eating and goes beyond the transitory nature of the manifestations by entering the pathological. The apparent ideal of an ascetic body transcends in a clear alteration of the examination of reality. The text therefore focuses on the psychological difference between need and desire, without forgetting the social weight of the tendency to see bodies as showcases. Visibility and body consistency, combined with feelings of guilt and shame, are enhanced by the emphasis placed on “food as a showcase”. Food production and consumption fluctuate intensely between equating appetite with a crime, with the relative sense of guilt and contamination, and an excessive and perverse orgiastic dimension of abuse and enjoyment. Eating disorders, while remaining symptoms or illnesses, also become the expression of imaginative relationships that are symbolically impoverished. The fundamental hunger for truth, which nourishes the mind, then becomes hunger, shared or rejected, adhering to the material object, to food, in the overwhelming dominance of concrete thought.