Introduction
Anorexia has been taking since the 1970s, the year in which Lacan (2012; cit. Laurent, 2016) anticipated a decline in the symbolic function and an ascent of jouissance to the social zenith in the capitalist era, an increasing world importance in terms of social, epidemiological, psychic and medical phenomenon, but also, and to a greater extent, subjective, so it is justified to rethink in the clinical field the ways of approaching it.
In this work we will try to demonstrate the thesis that mental anorexia1 It could be configured as a food symptom in the respective context of a neurosis. The current psychoanalytic clinic is based on a theory from which ordinary psychosis is the lens under which the subjects are received until proven otherwise. It has a reason, the fall of the father and the symbolic order allows us to explain the pathologies more on the side of compulsion than repression. In this theoretical framework, the psychoanalysts of the Lacanian orientation have sought to subsume the clinical problem of anorexia mental.
In this work we propose to test this theoretical framework because it seems important to us to slow down the direction installed in the practice of the diagnosis of this phenomenon that goes directly to demonstrate the practice of the excesses of jouissance. This prevents the capture of the theoretical clue that could lead to a cure through treatment as a neurotic problem without resorting exclusively to semantic-Oedipal interpretation.
Mental anorexia, by passing with uprooting of the social bond, with suicidal ideations, with extreme levels of malnutrition, with a non-metaphorized body (except in hysterical-anorexic forms) with a predominance of holophrase, superposition, non-differentiation between signifiers, annulment of the subjective interval, puts anorexia mental in a model that explains a whole series of cases that remain out of speech. With all this description of signs, psychoanalysts place mental anorexia in a clinic of the real, that is, clinic with signs of excessive jouissance, of the impossible, jouissance without limit, at the cost of life, and not in the clinic of repression as we had in Freud's histories (Balzarini, 2024a; 2024b; 2022).
For these reasons, which are structural, the causality of mental anorexia cannot be reduced to social factors, to the pressure of the ideals of thinness of the capitalist era, but is explained to a greater degree by these subjective reasons. In this way, what is installed in the theory and accepted in the psychoanalytic literature is revealed, the inference that the mechanism of repression has not operated in the forms in which the jouissance of anorexia is generally presented in our time.
The action of this paradigm that has been called the drug addict paradigm orders the modern clinician to practice from identifying these criteria as discrete signs of the symbolic hole with which it would be sufficient to diagnose a psychosis. But, we know, if the criteria operate, there are no longer questions. The action of the paradigm prevents the formulation of new hypotheses. Therefore, in this work we will try to review this theoretical position. We agree that anorexia is a clinic of excess, but not because of the front of obesity, but because of its obverse, deprivation.
When it seems that the anorexic2 She is in a happy harmony with her jouissance of eating nothing, in a selfishness, that is, in an undisturbed comfort, she does nothing more than sustain the destructive cruelty of her anorexic symptom and with this produce devastating effects on herself. The anorexic symptom, thus, is a manifestation of the death drive, with great suffering, because on the way the dimension of desire was not interposed, which is what prevents the drive from reaching its goal or at least not arriving quickly. The body, instead of being the seat of a joyful jouissance, is destroyed for being the seat of a mortal jouissance, without metaphor, closed doors to the unconscious structured as a language.
The psychoanalyst will offer himself in these cases as an interlocutor who allows that jouissance to become conversational, so that the anorexic subject can accept a renunciation of excess of deprivation, so that that excess of jouissance that invades his body can find a limit, can be trapped by the networks of the dimension of speech, to try to catch some of that jouissance in more and that a limitation is achieved in the experience through the extension of the symptom towards socially positive forms.
This is done to the extent that the psychoanalyst allows what the anorectic subject says not to be reduced to a statement in its literalness, but to introduce the enigma, the misunderstanding, which can refer to something else and thus remove the subject from the anesthesia of language, that is, use the metaphorical scope of language. If the psychoanalyst offers himself as a supposed subject to know, that is, he offers himself demonstrating to the subject with mental anorexia that there is a (unconscious) knowledge that escapes him, but that concerns him intimately, and that the analyst is supposed to have it, then the transfer that allows treatment to a subject with anorexia mental can be launched. But this is not easy, the excess of jouissance resists being trapped by the word, it is located in a dimension outside of discourse, outside the social bond, breaking all the chains that were beginning to be founded and, again, we have to build. It is a clinic of the patience that points out the difficulties and complexities of this type of cases, but that is not why we must go back.
The way to move forward is by recovering the dimension of the unconscious opened by Freud. The unconscious today does not manifest itself, what commands the subject is the immediacy of an incarnation of meaningless real jouissance. The rejection of the unconscious is the characteristic of the time (Balzarini, 2023a). Therefore we have to recover the Other to face how impossible the clinic is. Today's psychiatrists and psychologists are called to this challenge.
Clinical part
Of course, the cases are treated one by one in psychoanalysis, but in this section we are going to encourage ourselves to provide some "general" characteristics of the clinical type anorexia mental in terms of its modes of presentation.
In general, the patient who suffers from anorexia mental does not want to talk about himself, removes the word, freezes the symbolic scope of the word, resulting in a clinic of silence, of the deficiencies of metaphor, a clinic of the little word or of the desubjectivized word. It is a clinic of silence, but that does not disturb the subject, it is a silence that does not make the subject a sign of separation, that does not carry a message, it is not a dialectical silence, but a silence with difficulties for the bond with the Other, that demands nothing, that sinks into the real as it makes no sense.
But it is not a silence that excludes the Other, on the contrary, "it assumes the Other in its structural point of non-existence and non-guarantee. It is not a silence that essentially wants to be recognized. It is a limit silence, in which the subject can remain without feeling speechless" (Cosenza, 2019, p. 147). It is a silence that does not resonate with the subject as it resonates in the neurotic. The neurotic can't stand the silence, he is able to ask why don't you talk to me? On the other hand, the anorexic's silence is not disturbing to her. It is not a silence "attributable to the ghostly dialectic and its symbolization, but it is something that concerns the relationship of the subject with the most intimate real" (p. 148). It is a silence that annuls the voice, that removes the enunciation that carries the word.
Many anorexic treatments are sustained in negative transfer. For example, when he says "I don't want to talk to you", "why do you want me to talk so much?", "it's no use coming here", "you don't help me", "you can't get into my feelings", "I come because they force me". These modes of presentation, sometimes hostile, other times paranoid, are precious because they are resistances that the analyst has to know how to manage and make available to the patient's work. How? Offering the analyst as if accepting to be that thing that is useless in the life of this patient. If the analyst accepts that place of object, it can produce rapid changes in the experience of a patient with anorexia mental because the patient begins to count on with someone who says yes, who does not demand her, but who offers himself so that the subject can inhabit a space where she is the one who, if she wants, can demand and thus the desire of the subject begins to be caused.
Even if he wants to interrupt the treatment, the psychologist is not going to put himself in the same series as all the others who tell him that he has to eat, that he has to take care of himself, that he should not abandon his doctors, but he is going to show the patient that she is now the subject who rejects and the psychologist the rejected object, which enables a new logic for that patient in her experience. It is about leaving room for the desire of the anorexic and not responding with more rejection.
This allows the anorexic to be settled in the analytical work, that the transfer is built, between sessions, holding a necessary interval for the production of the subject. In that between she is holding on instead of being at the ends. Indeed, anorexics suffer remarkable variations in humor, that is, logic of all or nothing. They are super excited about something, and the next day that enthusiasm can fall to the bottom of the depression. An oscillation that clinically results from the absence of a consolidated orientation around the living of desire that is only possible if it is housed in a habitable Other.
If it is a teenage patient, it may happen that she does not feel like being in the classroom. In physical education they will not allow him to participate due to weight loss, that is, because he is not in condition. Mental anorexia in this case is functioning as a symptom of the difficult and explosive puberty. As a protection against the hole in knowledge, as a plug of that which presents the emptiness in the experience. When adolescence fails to be sufficiently a possible response to the problematic and impossible puberty then mental anorexia is a symptom of the enigma of sexuality, the result of the work of signification of the object cause of desire which repositions the adolescent no longer as a child-object, but as a subject.
At this point we propose to review the thesis offered by Cosenza (2019) that mental anorexia in adolescence, with the exception of hysterical forms, "is configured as a failure of the process of symptomatization of puberty" (p. 207). The adolescent work is to bring the subject to the encounter with a singular way of knowing how to do with his relationship to the drive, is what the anorexic does, although in a little vitalized state.
The anorexic manages to reposition herself as a subject in the dialectic at the cost of sustaining the symptom. In these cases, and in order to safeguard the student's school health, the psychologist could accompany by asking the school if it allows to send a report with a description of the student's situation specifying that at the moment she is not in a position to attend classes, but recommends that other ways can be thought of to sustain her school processes. In this way, the psychologist accompanies the processes that are initiated in the patient without losing the spaces where it has been articulated.
Other times it happens that the patient with anorexia wants to eat, but does not want to gain weight or change her figure. It may happen that she doesn't want to go to medical shifts either. The analysis tries that that patient can begin to say at least something, for example, that she is sad, that things happen to her, that she can begin to count on the space of the word to accommodate the anguish. Anger will grow if the patient with anorexia cannot speak. When he finds a favorable space to begin to deploy the word, the things that distress him begin to be built. For example, a patient of mine said that she is tired of her mother's voice, she complained: "my mom thinks she knows everything, but she doesn't know what's wrong with me." Not only her mother's voice makes her tired, but he can't stand being talked to, being told what he has to do. In these cases it is convenient to make her see that that Other unbearable for her does not accept that every gap that configures her cannot be covered. That's why the psychologist can suggest that she distance herself from her mother or from that Other who becomes unbearable. Precisely, anorexia is a way of interposing something between the subject and the threatening, controlling or persecutory Other. Or the confinement and the estraint of the Other are other forms.
Another patient of mine with anorexia mental was able to develop a transformation of her anorexic symptom through veganism. It is a way to start connecting with food from another place, he began to invite colleagues to his house, to discuss with other people about the importance of being vegan and to take responsibility for his diet, for example, chickpea milanesas, soy milanesas, which he learned to cook. In one session he came with guilt because he had eaten a food that contains nutrients of animal origin. I advised her that she can eat things that tempt her, she can eat an egg a day, but no more than an egg. Putting numbers on her calmed her down.
Now, if the ideas of death are too disturbing, hospitalization operates as a substitute home, a home outside, as school can also be, but that does not always manage to be that place-outside, a space where the patient could find the peace that she does not find in her own home. Antidepressive medication is also another tool, sometimes necessary, in these cases to combat the jouissance of dying. But the most important thing is to give the patient the possibility of being able to explain what makes her want to die. We don't ask her to please not kill herself, but we ask her what makes you want to die? Why are we going to ask her this? So that she can remove the libido that is put into that idea of killing herself, to disarticulate the idea of dying.
In the desire not to look fat, another patient with mental anorexia self-provoked vomiting and began a pain in her abdomen because the muscle was resented after voluntarily causing vomiting. "I eat everything I want and I don't get fat, because I evacuate" was his thought. The need to evacuate something from the body becomes imperative. The psychologist has to lead her to elaborate a history of this pain, but not the pain in the belly, but the story of his soul pains. Then she started saying that she has nightmares. I ask her, what does she associate them with? With the violence she lived in his childhood seeing his father beat his mother. It is about provoking a work of elaboration, point by point, of those acts of violence that are so difficult to bring to the word, that's already a treatment because by telling it puts it at a distance from her.
Many times the patient with anorexia mental is very close to the ideals. It is convenient to relieve her by saying that she can feel sad, she can cry, it is not necessary that she always shows herself well for others, that things also happen to her friends, family, etc., to all people, trying to make her look like a human being who suffers and that she has the opportunity to attribute meaning to her suffering. It is always about causing a work orientation through the word trying to recognize in her body the affectation, is since there that speaking produces consequences. What is the starting point of that orientation? The symptom, anorexia mental, which can certainly be a compass to guide us in the encounter with the subject's word. We are sure that after four or five sessions with this plan the patient with anorexia mental would again have the desire to do things, that is, it would improve, at least discreetly.
A good question for the patient with mental anorexia is the one that points to the moment of destabilization, which points to an area of not knowing, of disengagement, formulated as follows: Since when have you decided eat nothing? Or simply, what destabilized you? And there we will have an answer about his greatest pain. For example, a patient said: "I was destabilized to realize that I can't count on my biological father." The question that can follow is when did you realize this? To try to help the patient associate with a current event that would have led her back to that old rejected pain. You can ask her, if she is willing, scenes of those moments of pain in her childhood life.
The patient must feel that the people around her trust her, that they will not be behind her chasing her or locking her up for fear that something will happen to her, that does not contribute to the treatment. In general, this type of patient has an address to the Other, he is not autistic locked with his jouissance, but his problems include the Other, the Other is involved, as it is for the patient who says "it destabilized me to realize that I can't count on my biological father." The patient with anorexia does not suffer from not eating, but from her failed attempts to tie the Other. Thus, the food problem of a neurotic patient with anorexia mental concerns her problem with the Other.
The excessive rigor with which the anorexic treats her body could have a useful derivation, for example, in the study of nutrition careers, foreign languages, artistic dances, careers in relation to the law or with order, possible interesting exits for the patient with anorexia mental in which the good use of her jouissance could be tested, that is, with these exits her jouissance would no longer be left talking alone, but on the track of desire with others who like to talk about those topics and in a place where that jouissance can be productive. It is to give just destination to the singular way of jouissance, what Freud called sublimation. The important thing is that there are activities on the patient's horizon, that time is full, that not so many things are released to her own decision because that is when the hole in knowledge could be cruelly presented. At least until the initial identification of a symptom-function has been achieved.
Theoretical part
The anorexic paradox
The excess with which Lacanian-oriented psychoanalysis reads the phenomenon of mental anorexia is indicated by extreme control of the body and rigorous control of the Other, which is opposed to a noticeable loss of weight and desire. That is, the greater the gain of satisfaction of the drive, the less weight in your body. It is the paradox of quantity, of number, that makes the anorexia passion for the operation "of reduction, of subtraction, of deprivation, which is at the heart of anorexia" (Cosenza, 2019, p. 121). Mental anorexia is a rigorous and mathematical control, but, at the same time, a lack of control as extreme deprivation, which causes the sense of the limit to be lost. It is a hook to the Other through science because the anorexic insists on achieving objective results in her body of the deprivation of desire. While giving weight, while losing weight, controlling his body in an extreme way and gaining satisfaction, gaining in the jouissance of keeping desire dead, gaining the severity of the ideal of perfection.
A loss of reason in the act of vomiting, but an exaggerated control in the decision to kill the desire to eat. The problem is that after vomiting what is inaugurated is a new phase of binge eating. Because the factor that drives the filling is the void. From mania to depression and from depression to mania without stops. When the treatment for depression is the filling what results is that a new phase of depression is prepared, and worse because it underlines the impossibility. Such a paradox, as Cosenza (2019) says, is "the impossible enterprise of maintaining homeostasis and control of jouissance" (p. 108).
Mental anorexia is a resistance to being placed as an object of the will to enjoy the Other. This is indicated in the extraction of object in the field of the Other. The Other of the anorexic becomes complete and consistent so it is necessary to find ways to divide it. That's where anorexia arises as an attempt to make a foul in the Other's field. Something different from obesity in which it is not a reduction, but an excess. So that anorexia mental becomes a defense so that the Other does not become unbearable.
In this way, mental anorexia can be considered a symptom whose figure of deadly jouissance must be worked to articulate with a symbolic path more in line with the desire of the subject who suffers. By clearing this real core of the symptom and tying it with a job, the suffering symptom (mortifying) takes the form of a functioning symptom (vivifying) that encourages the subject to learn. In this significant displacement it is perceived that the basis of anorexia is the real nucleus that moves the symptom with which a subject armed a defense, albeit precarious, to try to solve the problems related to the consistent Other.
Often thinness assumes phallic value. The less weight, the more desired; eat less and less to be more and more the cause of your desire. Under that hysterical equation it remains in the logic of the phallus, it tries to sustain the anorexic solution as a way of being looked at, a call to the Other through a libidization of the thin body, cutting experience, castration, looking away instead of the food, an outline of a symptomatic elaboration hierarchizing her body to the point of wanting nothing to achieve desired. With this masquerade of beautiful body as thin the anorexic puts a phallic veil on the lack of sexual intercourse and enters the dialectic of the sexes in that the man will want to give her what she does not have, the phallus, and she will want to be what he lacks, the object.
Thus, Cosenza (2019) points out, mental anorexia, insofar as it does not have this veil on the enigma of sexuality, as it divorces the phallus, it is an encounter with the real, and that is why it affects women more, because it testifies that there is a jouissance beyond the phallus, which is typical of women, where there is a direct, absolute relationship, without mediation, with radical otherness, jouissance of the deprivation of the phallus with which we can also think of the clinic of depression and autism. Since Lacan's last teaching, according to Cosenza (2019), mental anorexia is characterized by a direct relationship with jouissance, not mediated by castration and the phallic signifier, properly female jouissance, without limits, in which the anorexic has no control of her body, but is taken over by a jouissance that comes from the mystic experience, experiencing a total loss of domain that fundamentally affects the body as a jouissance substance. In this way, Soria (2000) points out, anorexia mental indicates the failure of a woman in the work of creating feminine faces and masquerades that allow arrangements with jouissance.
Mental anorexia is a pathology due to the absence of the medication that the veil of the body provides in its function of signifier of the demand of the Other and mediation of its desire. That measure occurs from the encounter of the subject with the absence in the field of the Other. By not being there that measure, an excessive, limitless, jouissance is released. Hypercontrol, the super-egoic control that the anorexic makes of the weight of her body, is transformed into a total loss of control by the lack of this phallic measure, that is, hypercontrol is transformed into an illusion. In this illusion underlies the paradox that while the anorexic adores her body, she annihilates it.
The symptom is paradoxical. On the one hand, it is pathological, it points out the failure in repression, it is a kind of measure to not everything phallic and, at that point, it is healthy. It is the great news that Freud brings, that the symptom is health, as well as disease. In this sense, we can think of anorexia as a metaphor, although a metaphor for the rejection of the body, but a metaphor at last. Although in an early state, anorexia, as a symptom, is the subject's response to the anguish that inhabits him, an attempt to establish subjectively, to build a defense against the primordial and excessive jouissance of the living. The psychologist must house this defense, which is not yet well formed, and try to extend it towards a functional form that contains a value of demand, of call to the Other, "as an operation oriented to snatch a sign of love" (Cosenza, 2019, p. 144).
Separation of hunger and love
Given that the intake of food is an activity that sustains the conservation of life and considering that the human being seeks to stay in balance then anorexia is one of the most annoying things because it comes to question these postulates.
In its neurotic forms it comes to question the reduction of desire to need. Freud said that hunger and love are two different things. Hunger is a necessity that allows the conservation of life, it has a fixed object that calm, food, but mental anorexia comes to show that there is something beyond that simple correspondence relationship, there is something beyond instinct, there is the drive, which comes to question parents in the confusion that giving love is giving food, it comes to warn that there is something beyond the search for pleasure given by the cancellation of necessity, precisely the human being is not governed by that principle of maintaining the most Low possible the tension in the nervous apparatus. The anorexic, in order to awaken her parents' love for her, is willing to play with her own death, going on hunger strike, what Lacan (2013) calls the threat of disappearance. For her it is better to die than to live without the desire of the Other. "The young anorexic is willing to starve to death rather than run the risk that her desire will be confused by those who take care of her satisfying her needs" (Cosenza, 2019, p. 112).
The young woman rebels, what does this Other know about me? When I'm a baby I cry, but I don't know why I cry. There is an Other who interprets that as a request, a call, attributing a meaning to it, says "you are hungry" and he gives him the breast or the bottle, or says "you are uncomfortable" and he changes his position, or says "you have a stomachache" and he gives him a pain medication. Thus the need is satisfied by the Other who seems to know exactly what is needed in each situation to the screaming baby. The matter becomes more complex when the subject says no to that complete Other. Says no to the object set for the cancellation of the need. It's a decision, eats nothing.
Object nothing
The object nothing is an object of jouissance, in addition to the look and the voice, that Lacan (2010) contributes to the series of drive objects that Freud discovered (oral, anal, phallic). If nothing is an object, then it is capable of configuring, following Lacan's teaching, a ghostly relationship with a subject, that is, to structure a ghost, an argument that relates anorexia and neurosis. Indeed, the anorexic speaks from a position from which she looks at reality always complaining about a complete Other, a suffering linked to the relationship of jouissance with the object nothing. This "allows the subject to move from a massive and limitless relationship to a partial and oriented relationship, that is, pulsional, with jouissance" (Cosenza, 2019, p. 243). The dangerous thing is if this libidinal metaphor, this cut of jouissance, had not occurred.
Various psychoanalysts (Ansermet, 2011; Cosenza, 2019; Soria, 2000) assure that in mental anorexia the Other has not been installed as such. How is it that the Other has not been installed as such for the subject if the subject has cut out a drive object from the Other's field? This allows us to at least say that mental anorexia is related to neuroses, that is, that it is not all psychosis. Nothing is the object that causes the desire of the subject. It is a signifier that enters the logic of the phallus coinciding with the place of the enigma, that is, differentiated from the dimension of pure jouissance as the passion of the subject divided by sustaining nothing.
The object nothing is Lacan's most original contribution to the anorexic question. How does he find out? Thanks to what she teaches, precisely, the anorexic. It is an object that is not easy to refer to a precise erogenous zone. From the Lacanian psychoanalytic theory we know that each pulsional object arises from a circuit that the subject has with the drive from one of the gaps in the organism that opens to give rise to this singular circuit. Thus the oral object refers to the hollow of the oral cavity that Freud located between the beginning of life and two years; the anal object refers to the gap produced between the rectum and the anus that Freud located between two and three years; the phallic object, signifier of the fault, responds to the gap introduced by the signifier of castration, between three and five years; the object looked at sets the drive on the orbital cavity with which the subject looks at other things That represent the sexual libido; the voice object responds to the hollow of the ear. But the object swims, what precise area of the body does it refer to? Hurrying the answer a little, if anorexia is mental, would we have to locate the erogenous zone in the cranial cavity, that is, in the hole covered by cognition?
Beyond locating it strictly in an area of the body, what is important about this object is its operability. Miller (cit. Cosenza, 2019) raises the thesis that the object nothing is, among the objects of the drive, the only object that functions as a cause of non-desire. It is an object that exerts a devitalizing action, but not anti-dialectical. It is the only one of the objects that is closest to the real nucleus of jouissance, since it is presented as that rigorous and absolute jouissance, without deficit, a libidinal circuit without loss, without limits, of a non-partial but total object. The phallus has not entered the libidinal economy or is weakened. Non-vitalized desire can be standy even in a look, voice or whatever object can be devitalized, as an anti-desire, whether it is a relationship to an oral, anal, scopic or invoking object.
It is a desire to reject life that prevents the subject from entering the symbolic story, retaining a primordial and lossless jouissance. The object nothing remains occupying the place of the phallus. This may have been put together in this way because the Other, in its constitutive times, took the girl as an object of will to enjoy, closing the dialectic, preventing the vitalization of a desire and the phallic logic, a painting that Lacan (2008) represents with the crocodile mother who swallows the child. The paternal function does not regulate the desire of that woman who is behind the mother. No one takes charge of that desire until the child remains in the real as the phallus of the mother, phallus that completes the image of the mother's body, meaning nothing in the symbolic in the madness of that jouissance of two. Anorexia in these cases works as a limit against the unregulated jouissance of the maternal Other.
In these cases, belonging to the field of psychosis, the development of mental anorexia in the child introduces a somatic limit (in the absence of symbolic limit) between the child and the madness of the maternal Other, it is a defense with respect to this Other who wants to enjoy it without limit. The object nothing is located then, here, between the child as a subject and the crazy desire of the mother, as a primordial defense of the anorexic child against the fact of being a real and exclusive object of maternal jouissance. (Cosenza, 2019, p. 233).
This passion for the object nothing, which we place as a clinical equivalent in the devitalization of desire, is, according to our hypothesis, a symptomatic response of exhausted subjects in the hypermodern era. Society of fatigue, as located by Byung-Chul Han, where the prevalence of the ideal of control towards productive purposes produces a subject of pure competition, without the unconscious. And no one protests about this, subjected to the idea of an exhaustive control, everyone continues to work, except the anorexic whose symptom also works. Here the object nothing is what keeps the subject in a jouissance that, according to our thesis, is not jouissance of the One, it is not anchoring to das Ding, it is not rejection to enter into play as a joyous substance in the world of life. It keeps the subject in a living jouissance, but a dead life, a life in which suffering is installed, does not pass, stays, is screwed, is fixed, it's the experience that it is the same day always, it does not go from there, it is lasting, it is the time of suffering, of boredom, as when we say "time does not pass", that heavy time because desire is dead. Anorexia is then a protest in the style of a truth said: "we are born to die."
Anorexic recovers Marxist society. In the society of capital that Marx describes, the worker was exploited, but from a certain level of production it reached its limit: protests. On the other hand, in the neoliberal society described by Han (2022) the oppressive instance is apersonal, there is no one or something against which the subject directs his fighting force. A "we" is not constituted, a collective is not erected that can rise up against the system, it is the silence of the death drive. The human being is tempted to be a free producer, isolated, self-taught, exploiter of his own self. The action of repression has become conquered by the action of temptation. Today everyone "is lord and servant in the same person" (Han, 2022, p. 33). Which provides the feeling of freedom, but paradoxical, because it is no more than slavery at the service of performance. Mental anorexia comes to denounce this paradox of the capitalist world to say I don't want to.
Every era has its emblematic diseases. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, diseases carried an excess of positivity, we had this indicated in hyperactive children or in the burnt brain syndrome, which constitute the pathological manifestations of a paradoxical freedom. The subject was subjected to the pressure of producing, but a final point is never reached. It was lived permanently with a feeling of lack that is maximized by the virulence with which the feeling of guilt is strengthened. We no longer competed with others, but with ourselves. It is the thesis of Alain Ehrenberg (cit. Han, 2022), that if there were so many depressions in this world it was because the reference to the conflict had been lost.
From the second decade of the twenty-first century, the object nothing is the recipient of the drive circuit through which the subjects are now commanded. The object nothing disturbs the link between signifier one and signifier two, it is installed in the discursive chain devitalized its chaining. The consequence is that the interval between the signifiers where the divided subject is installed is not produced. The libido does not cover the chain of signifiers, the fallic function is deactivated. It is the object not drained by the function of the phallus. That is why it should not be confused with hysteria even if it has the body as the seat of jouissance. There the anorexic solution, thinking of a psychosis, cannot function as a symptom, but would rather function as an arrangement of the body fragmented in the experience of the mirror. While the anorectic symptom is a neurotic process that works like a veil. In the case of a solution, the analyzing work is that it can sustain it, while in the case of a symptom the analyzing work is that it manages to subjective the anorexia, that the mental anorexia does not become a stereotyped, fixed, literal phenomenon, but that it can slide towards a question that the patient can open at the level of the enunciation, holding on to the symptom so that it asks her a question, to bring the subject closer to his unconscious, in a work that can give enigmatic value to his dream productions, lapsus, that can count on an Other with which to recognize that It escapes the value that the formations of the unconscious have and transforms them into concepts, susceptible to being hooked on a subjective sense. If she can do that, she is already working on disarming that nothing she eats, on disarticulating it as an object of destiny of all her libido.
In this way, eating nothing is the way in which the subject of the second decade of the twenty-first century has decided to oppose the totalitarian demand of a non-barred Other plaintiff to push the desire of that Other not to be reduced to simple care, but to incorporate the dimension of love, at least in the neurotic forms of mental anorexia. By eating nothing, the anorexic emphasizes that desire is not reduced to necessity. That the jouissance of the deprivation of the hysteric to leave herself unsatisfied in her desire and thus preserve desire can be taken to the extreme by separating, in an act of decision, from the stirrups of phallic mediation. This implies that anorexia mental cannot be reduced to the hysterical neurotic structure, but neither can anorexia be separated from neurosis. His body at risk of death is presented as a call to the Other to rectify his position and be able to give the anorexic subject "his own fault, the gift of his love" (Cosenza, 2019, p. 112).
Care and desire are separated considerably and that is the denunciation of anorexic in a capitalist world that wants to erase differences. Mental anorexia comes to stand in front of the capitalist master who covers the gaps of pain with food to state that food, assumed as obvious and necessary, can be alien to the human being. The anorexia comes to raise that the devouring instinct is torn from its wild bestiality to get into the gorges of the signifier. Unlike obesity, the subject in mental anorexia manages to put an end to the devouring pulsional excess. Anorexia at this point is a crushing of desire.
Devoration is replaced by a very complex form of relationship with food that basically questions the law of commensalism that applies to everyone in the same way. If the nutritionist, the psychiatrist, the school, the mother, the psychologist, intend to regulate the relationship of a subject who suffers from anorexia mental with food then the result will be a deep rejection of the unconscious.
Criticism of the economic regime is not long in coming in this symptomatic form. Mental anorexia denounces that the surplus of food in continuous circulation in capitalist countries is not available to the majority of the population, not the whole population is in a position to buy it. Thus, Cosenza (2019) points out, anorexia nervosa indicates the "access of the subject to the field of a discursive food experience" (p. 41). There we have already moved away from the field of pure jouissance and we have entered the field of the symptom. In fact, jouissance without rest proves impossible when the young woman vomits. The tempting binge followed by vomiting indicates the paradoxical relationship of the subject with the jouissance: complete, but empty. Loss of control in anorexia mental is indicated in binge eating. "In the binge you feel devoured by the object, irresistibly pushed to eat it, and in this movement you do not live as the owner of your own act, but on the contrary as a slave of an ungovernable appetite" (p. 79).
The anorexic gives up something of her own body, precisely the function of food, to create a lack which makes it possible to libidinize the relationship with food within a symbolic framework. It is not that the relationship with food in the young anorexic is devoid of libido, on the contrary, it is loaded with libido, in a symptomatic form that is what makes it sustain and resist being corrected. Thus the desire to eat is tamed in what they have as instinctive in a formation that marks the opening of food and the entry into the symbolic world. Oral compulsion is treated by this complex operation, called anorexia, whose symbolic regulation is its primary function (Cosenza, 2019).
The psychologist has to see in each case the way in which the Oedipal prohibition has been lacking in the symbolic process, a lack that is favored by the way of jouissance the capitalist era in which the loss of jouissance is absolutely denied and the capitalist subject is excited to recover all the jouissance he loses through the consumption of goods which erases the importance of the symbolic in the singular processing of the loss (Cosenza, 2019). This impact of capitalism turns the human act, for example, the act of eating, into desubjective, that is, devoid of the symbolic elaboration of the subject in its relationship with the eaten object.
In this panorama of imperative of jouissance, anorexia mental comes to present itself as a resistance, a kind of symbolic elaboration, but not known, in the face of the push to jouissance that produces the rejection of the unconscious. As Harris (1989) says, the time to eat is no longer like before, a moment of family, of pause, of detention, of chat, of meeting, of pleasure, none of that is in the moment of eating of capitalism. On the contrary, the capitalist subject while eating is attentive to work, or eats alone, or worse, does not eat, because it is necessary to serve the incessant production cycles. Fast food is the prototype of this.
As Cosenza (2019) says, this adds to the "ongoing crisis of the family system as a primordial agent of symbolic regulation of the subject's experience and the time of the meal" (p. 43). Pure nutrition is no longer as before a sufficient value to grasp the subject in life. The moment of the meal becomes desubjective, lacking the mediation of the word of the Other between the subject and the jouissance. To this, anorexia mental comes to respond as a symptom of the time that metaphorizes what is being rejected in the symbolic.
The subject's relationship with food is not natural, but impulsive, and this is Freud's great discovery, an organ that serves two masters: the conservation function of life and the impulsive erogenous function. It is what Lacan (2008) has named as plus of jouissance, that is, a gain of jouissance that is settled in the gaps of the body that goes beyond the pleasure produced by the cancellation of physiological need. In the case of anorexia it is about underlining a fixation on the oral drive, the path of the drive found in that area a frustration, but not to give it an unstoppable solution like obesity, but to establish it as a mode of jouissance.
Freud (2011) teaches that the toxic substance, the intoxicating substance, which he calls a penalty remover, provides the subject with a substitute satisfaction of those portions of his libido that have been frustrated by the renunciation of the satisfaction to which the neurotic has been subjected. Our thesis is that anorexia mental proposes a paradigm of this, as a way of bonding the Other that is not by adopting substitute forms, replacing the original frustration, but by permanently making that frustration present in its unfinished state. It is not the rejection of the loss of the object, a milestone that inaugurates the field of desire, that operates in anorexia, but the acceptance, by the anorexic subject, of the experience of incompleteness or, more precisely, of the difficulty in the normal continuation of the drive. The desire for nothing actualises this difficulty and testifies to a non-proportion between subject and object of the drive or of a plurality of the object that only demonstrates that there is no such object for satisfaction.
As Harris (1989) says, the fast food restaurant was a discovery comparable to the arrival of man on the moon, in the sense of meeting the demands of consumption and production, which have been installed as central values of growth through accumulation (Han, 2022). The ease of eating in the car or in differentiated and fragmented spaces means the rejection of the family as a central value, something that Lacan (2003) already anticipated in 1938. For example, the boom of the hamburger, which is nothing more than minced meat, was installed on the beaches and in festive events such as the food that comes to cover the gap produced by the absence of relationship between people, but, above all, the void produced by homogenization. As Harris (1989) has studied, the word "hamburger" originated among German immigrants traveling on the Hamburg-America line, "to whom a mixture of minced meat and onion was served" (p. 35). The association between eating, fragmentation and traveling produces a nexus that responds to the demands of capitalism. It is about making the time of the meal enter in a standardization that subtracts its creative value. The series of meals adapts the subject to a chain of equal meals, which erases the differences between people's tastes, which exempts the subject from working for sustaining what he likes, and eliminates the opportunity that a subject can find in the bond with the Other his own way of being there.
At a McDonald's restaurant, the burgers arrive already prefabricated and frozen from the central distributors. Employees fry them, put them on a bun of bread with a slice of cheese or some seasoning, and pack them in styrene foam containers at a pace fast enough to have enough stock to immediately satisfy any customer's order. In theory, at Burger King the burgers should be served ten minutes after cooking. (Harris, 1989, p. 36).
Equality between people is the claim of the market, but precisely that tendency to equality is what produces greater manifestations because the subject in the unconscious is not equal to another, it is not comparable, despite the fact that it consumes the object of the market that has entered the series, somewhere it has to express that it does not accept equality. Lacan (2007) says that the act takes away his certainty from the anguish. Consumption is the act in the sense of a suicidal act, while anorexia is the action of not eating that resists the consumerist act to create the unconscious value that food has for the subject, a value that can only be found in speech. That is why psychoanalysis is convenient in this work of bringing mental anorexia closer to its symptom status. The construction of an analytical symptom is the step in which the subject takes responsibility for his own response to the enigma of his suffering and that step has as its center the anguish of which anorexia mental is his most fervent protection.
How to guide a cure that involves a new alliance between jouissance and word? Through the construction of desire that, as Lacan says, is the desire of the Other. A fundamental point is given here. If the desire of the Other is diffuse, if in the Other something does not arise that can give the subject a sign of a fault, an opaque, gloomy point occurs, which obscures the experience. It is what Cosenza says (2019), that the subject with the symptom anorexia mental could testify of parents without desire, that is, the couple of parents of the anorexia subject is a united couple, but "empty of desire, devitalized, only in a position to transmit a dead desire to the daughter" (p. 49). The daughter is redirected to being an individual who easily falls into a kind of manic exaltation that supposes, as indicated by Fridman and Millas (2005a; 2005b; cit. Balzarini, 2023a; 2024c), the death of the subject.
Manic exaltation is one of the ways in which subjective death occurs. This is the loss of the interval between S1 and S2. The mania is relative to metonymy, of an automatic character, to such an extent that it erases the desired subject. In the last meeting of Seminar 10, Lacan says that in mania it is about the absence of function of object a, and no longer simply its ignorance. Not only is the object of jouissance unknown, but it is absent. The subject is no longer weighed down by any object, it is not ordered by an axis, but it is about delivering that object to infinite metonymy without the possibility of escape. In this way, mania does not present a state of subjective possibility, but is the effect of the invasion of jouissance to the point of eliding all possibility of desire which results in a dead subject as abolished in its relationship with desire. (Balzarini, 2023a, p. 64).
In the clinic of anorexia mental, the psychologists have to fight the death of desire, the devitalization of desire, the separation between knowledge and desire. The anorexic wants little or wants nothing (Soria, 2000). For example, he does not ask adults to give him explanations of the things of the world, as children do. Its presentation is an apathetic state of desire, disenchanted, hopeless, indifferent, whether in the sexual dimension, in cultural objects, in social ties or in discourse.
The anorexic subjective position is to force the Other to signify it as nothing, it is an active position in the drive in which jouissance is located in existing as nothing, eating nothing is a decision because eating is an action. Action gives the idea of a certain continuity of the anorexic symptom, while the act, model of the suicidal act, is discontinuous, comes to break what the subject set up as stable. The action of eating nothing would thus be a defense against the suicidal act and in this sense a solution (Balzarini, 2023b; Cosenza, 2019).
Eating nothing is a subjective decision, it is an active position of the pulsional subject, positioning yourself as related to an object of jouissance, nothing, which results in a way of existing for the Other: dead. It is not that she kills, as an active subject, nor is it that the Other kills her, as a passive subject, but that she makes herself killed, seeks the conditions in an Other for which she can make herself exist being nothing, asking nothing, being interested in nothing, renouncing to try to capture attention, saying nothing. It is not that the Other is not there, it is not that it is a jouissance without the Other as various psychoanalysts of the Lacanian orientation maintain (Soria, 2000; Recalcati, 2011; Fernández Blanco, 2004; Cosenza, 2019; 2018a; 2018b; Racki, Berger, Karpel & Lejbowicz, 2016), but, and this is our thesis, the Other has to be for this action to be sustained, this decision nothing, weakened or dead desire. She actively puts the object nothing between herself and the Other. All libido is set on holding this nothing before the Other to affect him. Worried more about holding this nothing than realizing that she is dying. At this point of rejection of the body it resembles hysterical, but differs in that it is not unsatisfied desire, but weakened or dead. Her reasoning es: dead desire, then I exist.
This is not far from Freud. He found that the forms of the symptom in neuroses exist as an unknown force goes against the realization of unconscious sexual desire. The subject agrees to enter love life and inscribe his own drive in the Other's field to make a couple, a process of which the construction of a symptomatic path begins. Thus, Freud discovered that the symptom is the substitute satisfaction of sex life. The anorexic updates the Freudian discovery in terms of the sign of our time: fall of desire. Fall or absence of the phallus, mediator in the circuits of jouissance, which prevents reducing the psychogenesis of mental anorexia to the social imperative of female thinness sustained by fashion.
If the Other does not look at her, does not listen to her, the anorexic will make that Other put some interest in her. For that she must deeply renounce the satisfaction of eating, as the hysterical renunciation of sexual satisfaction to constitute herself as an object of desire as it is unsatisfied. The anorexic operates a new turn, more than dissatisfied she is dead. It is an extreme turn that goes from body to desire. This is how he pays the price of a deficit of jouissance to enter the love life with the Other. It is a deficit of jouissance that almost expels her from phallic jouissance. It is not an undivided subject, of autistic jouissance modality, but it is not a subject that has found a functional jouissance modality.
The death of desire, says Cosenza (2019), exempts the subject from the responsibility of knowing what he wants, from the assumption of his desire for which he must work. It goes hand in hand with a process of formation of the being that requires solving existential questions. Thus, mental anorexia symbolizes the horror of knowing whose answer "is to protect yourself by erecting a barrier with the symptom" (p. 123). Mental anorexia is the way of defending against the real core of the unconscious. The anorexic symptom is subject to the dimension of the internal jouissance and that is why the subject who suffers from it is bothered to talk about the subject of food. She may well recognize that she has a problem, but she generally says she's going to solve it on her own. It is the way to freeze her relationship to the unconscious.
What Lacan maintains is that this continuous stereotyped word around food has the function of defending the anorexic subject from something that horrifies him: the encounter with the hole in knowledge, with the non-existence of the Other. (p. 149).
In such a case, if anorexia is a barrier to the subject's encounter with the hole of his unconscious knowledge, it is a symptom in his status, not of return of the repressed, but of metaphorization of that opaque jouissance. Holding nothing is the passion to freeze the relationship with knowledge, to sustain an empty knowledge, is not wanting to know the relationship with the heart of the unconscious. Who wants to know that? At least not the neurotics. Except for hysterical forms where the passion for knowledge is to achieve the division of the subject.
Cosenza (2919) states that "we cannot define anorexia as a symptom in the classical sense of the term" (p. 209), that is, in the Freudian sense of return of the repressed, but this does not mean that anorexia cannot behave as a symptom in the Lacanian sense of response of the real, an extension of jouissance that has gone through a process of metaphor. What Cosenza says is that the anorexic closes the significant interval, holophrases the signifiers by abolishing the interval, purifies the enigma in the field of knowledge and installs in that field an absolute certainty, outside of signifier, that is, outside the dialectics, that's why she does not want to speak, she is absolutely determined, nothing moves her, she installs a petrification of jouissance constituted by nothing.
What directs the anorexic is not desire, but horror. Horror that is indicated as an abrupt fall of desire. This does not contradict the thesis that anorexia is a maneuver of the subject of the unconscious tending to open in the Other a fault. The horror of unconscious knowledge indicated in eating nothing, wanting nothing, death of desire, also works to open a lack in the Other and to know what the subject's place would be in the desire of the Other. For the last Lacan, eating nothing is the rejection of the Other, while in the thesis of the first Lacan, mental anorexia is a way of making a lack in the Other. The point is to locate the way in which the anorexic interprets that the Other receives her message. If she interprets that her Other does not acknowledge receipt of the message she enunciates and does not seek a solution to this, then the horror of unconscious knowledge will be affirmed in such a way that she will let herself die before finding knowledge. In this sense, we maintain that eating nothing is not a movement of closure of the space of lack, but its opening.
The fall of desire is indicated, for example, in the resignation of sexual life. It is a symptom of the time, says Balzarini (2023b), that in hypermodernity there is no place to feel, the link of the consumer subject with the market is of a suffocating saturation, all the time the new fashion is offered, where it is the subject who must take charge of the separation from that Other who imposes his will to enjoy. The anorexic, in order not to be at the expense of the drive without mediation, assumes the risk despite the fact that that separation has the high cost of having to embody the object nothing, that is, in order to separate from that other without cracks that does not leave a space of own creation she must die in body. We have this indicated in the pills that anesthetize the feeling, so much so that it doesn't even make you want to have sex. Prozac, for example, pushes not to feel. A refusal to feel. When I'm not up there, then depressed. You have to be happy all the time. Against this the struggle of the anorexic is erected, even if she does not say it.
The fall of desire is also indicated in the difficulty of sustaining companies, workers or paternal functions. Anorexia is there to open a question in these inconsistencies typical of the time, that is, it invites to open a fault in the Other. It is the flesh of the movement of separation, of differentiation, therefore a prelude to the formation of neurotic symptoms. Anorexia mental is the name that at the time receives the impossibility of sustaining the imperative of completeness. It is a metaphorical way in which the subject of the time says that he does not want to be seized, absorbed, subjected to the real of the unconscious. This is why we maintain that mental anorexia does not evade castration, it does not avoid the lack in the Other and the encounter with the subjective division itself, rather it tries to produce it in a time when that is diffuse. Mental anorexia is then the rescue of the Other.
Anorexia and puberty
The extreme control of the anorex with respect to her body collides in puberty with the surprising appearance of sexual characters, the pelvic enlargement, breast growth, the first menstruation, the subtle change of the voice, the first masturbations and other changes that shake the security in the control of the body because these changes occur beyond her will. If he imagined that he could control his body, these changes offer him a doubt to that certainty with which the subject was unified with his body. There is no certainty that the body belongs to the subject, that the subject owns his body. He has a body, but it's not certain that it's his. His self staggers because of the hyper-powerful powers of the drive. How to defend yourself from these powers? With the cause of desire. Now, between her and her body there is anorexia, a symptom of failure.
Many times in the clinic with teenagers you hear the difficulties of finding a way of life. Adolescence is a path of doubts, that's why the anorexic puts libido in this unique cause, nothingness, from which its symptom arises that it strongly maintains, without a doubt, because it faces this hormonal-sexual onslaught that comes from within, with it makes its feet against this advance that comes from the body. Symptom that is not worth trying to eliminate, but using so that the anorexic can question herself.
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in The liquid modernity, has located that the modality of social ties is based on liquidity, fragility, helplessness and instability. As Cosenza says (2019), "the structure of the contemporary symptom is characterized by a fragility of its symbolic-metaphorical function and by an accentuation of its aspect of jouissance" (p. 47). That is why the greatest work for the anorexic in a psychotherapy is to recover what in that structure of the symptom is already presented as a metaphorical function, but that is not known by the subject taken by the speed of the time in which the symptom does not work. It is about giving that fragility a consistency from articulating the symptom and its condenser nucleus of jouissance with a convenient use to the extent that it articulates the desire. In other words, "if the eating disorder stages, in many subjects, a divorce between the symptom and its metaphorical function" (p. 47) psychoanalysis will authorize a meeting created by the subject.
Psychoanalysis has to be that place where the subject, absorbed by suffering from the form of the narcissistic-specular ties that sustain an economy of jouissance with a closed circuit, finds a symbolic mediation where he can reserve a place in the Other's field and recognize himself as a differentiated subject of the imaginary identity to which he has remained attached. That place called psychoanalysis houses in its device what is rejected in the social Other so that little by little the subject elaborates a story in which he wants to live. In this way, it is prevented that the subject takes the path of the passage to the suicidal or self-destructive act.
The path of suicide is easily given when the Other has been rejected, that is, when the jouissance is out of speech. There "the statements reach the subject as imperative orders by effect of which the jouissance is imposed on him" (Cosenza, 2019, p. 50). When the discourse does not take place, the autonomous exercise of the death drive in its absolute nudity makes its domain impossible. It is the problem in anorexia mental, where the subject is constantly and deadly confronted with the ideal of the thin body, the body without aggregates, thin body as without weight, without attachments. It is in this that anorexia carries a potential symptom status because it takes the body for a treatment of jouissance. Because it takes the body is a narcissistic pathology, that is, the subject is confronted with the severity of the ideal of the self that makes the cruelty of an ideal image of the body fall on itself. This does not mean a symptom of conversion to the hysterical mode, that is, it does not mean that the psychologist has to treat this as hysteria. Although in mental anorexia there are relationships with hysteria in that the subject who embodies "a bodily ideal that makes it special in the eyes of the Other" (Cosenza, 2019, p. 68). However, from the theory of Lacanian-oriented psychoanalysis, in the hysterical symptom the Other is present, while mental anorexia accuses the exclusion of the Other. Thus, anorexia mental testifies to a disconnect between jouissance and words.
Anorexia and superyo
Because of this incarnation of the ideal of the self, anorexia mental is revealed as a problem of not avoiding conflict. The subject in anorexia does not avoid conflict, but solves it by embodying the ideal, takes charge, the body of the anorexic is the superego in its cruel aspect. It is what testifies to a complete independence, to an abrupt separation between the subject and the object. The rejection of wanting to know about the unconscious desire results in the affirmation of a categorical jouissance to which the anorexic obeys without complaints affirming this imperatively. If you don't try to answer the question what does this, anorexia, mean to me? If you don't accept the demand to want to know what happens to you, you will be commanded by this absolute jouissance of the superego.
Freud (cit. Balzarini, 2023c) will associate this superego with Kant's concept of categorical imperative. He wonders: "Where does the force for this empire extract from, the compulsive character that is externalized as a categorical imperative?" (Freud, 2007, p. 49), which goes hand in hand with this other question "How is it that the superego is essentially externalized as a feeling of guilt (better: as a criticism; feeling of guilt is the perception that corresponds in the self to that criticism), and thus unfolds against the self such an extraordinary hardness and severity?" (p. 53). To answer he uses what he discovered about melancholy. He explains that the death drive drives the severity of this unconscious feeling of guilt. Then he says that in melancholy we find
That the hyperintense super-ego, which has dragged consciousness towards itself, fell with merciless fury on the self, as if it had taken over all the sadism available in the individual. According to our conception of sadism, we would say that the destructive component has been deposited in the superego and has turned towards the self. What now rules in the superego is like a pure cultivation of the death drive, which often manages to effectively push the self to death, when the self failed to defend itself before its tyrant by turning the mania. (p. 52).
As Delgado (2014) says, it is a ruthless satisfaction that pushes the subject to the worst. For example, wanting to be thinner than they can actually be or demanding others to be less consistent than their nature allows them. The work with the anorexic is to try to get her to accept to be questioned by her symptom, locate how she is disturbed by her symptom, instead of making with it a happy harmony.
Freud (2012) says that the person who is sad feels a deep and painful discomfort, can feel a loss of interest in the outside world, a loss of the ability to choose a new object of love to replace the crying, a strangeness about any work even the loss of appetite. Such a state, says Freud, is not pathological, it should not be disturbed, it should not be moved, it should not be questioned, it is not convenient to try to get the sad person to resume his normal life. Commonly grief appears in the face of the loss of a loved one or an abstraction that takes the place, as a social function, as an identity, the homeland, freedom or as an ideal. It is a normal affection that must necessarily be passed on. It can be accompanied, but not taken as abnormal. The person who goes through a duel leaves nothing for other purposes and interests and grief absorbs the self. But what must be clear is that a state like this is not sick.
It is common for the family to try to convince him to take care of tasks that make him forget the pain or that they try to encourage him with phrases like "you have everything to be well." This is not advisable, at all. Well-being is an ideal. If the subject allows himself to be absorbed by an ideal, that is, if he ceases to offer resistance to the pressure of normality, he can crush it more. The mourning can be worked point by point, but it is also necessary to introduce time. Both things will help a grieving person to remove the libido of that object to which it was tied.
The pain is that he has realized that the beloved object, that to which he linked his interest, has ceased to exist. The work of mourning then consists of removing, little by little, the libido that had been put in the link with that object and re-conducting it. The first half of this work is difficult, the hurt one opposes a resistance, generally fighting to retain that object, for the simple fact of having found there a place to articulate his libido. The non-hurried work allows the hurt to get rid of the object, finding a certain appeasement and the self is returning to its uninhibited state.
We must differentiate, says Freud (2012), this state of melancholy. Melancholy is the term under which Freud included what is now usually designated as a state of depression. The depressed person has the same picture of sadness mentioned above, but something else is added, a reduction in the feeling of himself. The depressed person reproaches himself, denigrates himself, and can become extreme up to a delirious expectation of punishment. His self is significantly lowered, he becomes impoverished, he tells himself that he is unworthy, that he is despicable, he becomes guilty (which is not the same as responsible for what he complains about), he justifies humiliation to himself, he submits himself to an extreme need for punishment, he gives in to the pressure of a hyper-severe moral instance, he becomes a victim of the cruelty of the superego and he is not ashamed to expose that loss of respect for himself in public. Depression is then a disease. The sick in depression is given by the unconscious component of the need for self-punishment that is causing the disturbance of the feeling of self, which in mourning is not found. This is what differentiates a mourning from a depression.
In depression, says Freud, there is a link with the oral stage of libido, a stage in which the human being is dependent on another person who provides him with the satisfaction of his needs. In that act of being nourished there is a feeling of devouring, of eating in an uncivilized way from the source of food that that person provides and in this way ensuring identification. It appropriates the body of the other provider to treat it with hostility, to devour it, that is, it eats the other as an object and incorporates it into itself. When that object is lost, it produces a feeling of abandonment in the subject who devours his own identification. Losing the object is then losing the self. That's why Freud says the shadow of the object falls on the self. In this way, the libido, instead of being placed in an external and differentiated person of its own body, is replaced by an identification of the most severe instance of the soul, morality, an instance that will end up devouring itself. The critical instance has taken the self as its object, the shadow left by the loss of the object has fallen, with all its strength, on the self. What is revealed for the melancholic is that the hostility he directed at the object now turns to the self as an object of hostility. The devouring object is no longer mediating that relationship with jouissance. The suffering for living punished is unbearable. Then think about suicide.
Thus, Freud (2012) said, the person who thinks about suicide does not do it because his life does not make sense or because he cannot overcome some debt or loss, as is commonly thought, but does it because he is taken by an intense feeling of guilt that is equivalent to the crushing of desire. They are people taken by the greater severity with which the cruel and critical instance of our being, the superego, operates. It is, according to Lacan (2007), the imperative of jouissance. Satisfaction is what became a duty. That is why the symptomatic forms of discomfort in culture today have to do with the practices of jouissance. Food pathologies, drug addictions to suicide.
The subject is dead if he is fixed to keep lifeless things standing, "where the rupture of the bond becomes the most frequent response to the difficulties of sustaining it" (Cosenza, 2019, p. 49). For example, girls who hold the old body of a father or who support the non-separation of the parents by sacrificing their own desire. What cannot be stopped is the link between life and the lack of desire in anorexia. The learned way of enjoying is to make a dead desire exist. The absence of divorces in most couples of parents of anorexic girls is a fact that Selvini Palazzoli, Cirillo, Selvini and Sorrentino (1999) have located in this sense, which allows us to interpret precisely what Lacan indicates about the dead desire to which the anorexic has been fixed, an archaic and unused desire. "In this context, the daughter does not find a place in the family bond as a subject of desire, but as a producer of a narcissistic complement" (Cosenza, 2019, p. 50).
Is it about intervening the Other of the subject to regularize it, limit it, order it, in terms of the invasion of jouissance that gives to our patient? It would not be a bad strategy, especially when it comes to underage patients, but it is not about making this strategy an operational law. It is rather about interpreting mental anorexia as a form of response to this disorder in the desire of the Other. In its neurotic modality, anorexia is presented as a formation of commitment that mediates between the strength to fulfill a desire and what opposes it. The resistance to fulfilling a wish is the strength that Freud was most interested in investigating his neurotic patients. In anorexia to this force that resists the realization of desire we have it indicated in the jouissance of the object nothing. No desire, death of the subject, condition to sustain the bond with the Other. Thus, the anorexic makes a couple with the dead desire.
In reality, in general, in anorexia mental the subject does not have a suicidal intention, he does not seek death, which is indifferent to him, although he often finds it. It is his passion for nothing, the object that causes his jouissance and that annihilates his desire, which blinds her to the point of leading her to die for him. (Cosenza, 2019, p. 231).
The critical point in the clinic of mental anorexia occurs when the patient begins to decide and make some movements towards a greater autonomy typical of a work of subjectivation. The historicization of the symptom carried out under transfer in the psychoanalytic cure allows the subject to give a shape from his unconscious to what has activated the food pathology, recognizing its function (Cosenza, 2019). The treatment does not aim to eliminate the symptom, it aims to recognize the symbolic function internal to the structure of the symptom.
From that work it is possible for a subject to begin to take a position that is found in those crucial moments where in life the subject "is facing a crossroads in which his subjective decision would be hindered or oppose the demand of the Other" (Cosenza, 2019, p. 82). There it will be tested if the subject tends to drop his own desire so as not to confront the disagreement before the Other or if he manages to clear his desire that is mixed in the imperative statement that he hears from the Other. Precisely eating nothing preserves the subject's own statement, protecting it from being absorbed by the statements contained in the demand of the Other.
It is a critical point when the subject's decision appears as a result of a work of interpretation of one's own position, a work of separation, which begins to shake the balance and the paradoxically annoying and uncomfortable comfort that the anorexia disease had produced with the unconscious sense of sustaining the bond with the Other from being nothing more than a complement of his narcissism. It is a critical point because "the narcissistic homeostasis of the bond cracks" (Cosenza, 2019, p. 51), and something of the subjective position of the patient can "enter a discourse, function as a symptom, open the possible space of a demand" (p. 51). Thus, in the clinic of mental anorexia the desire of the subject is dead because "it is absorbed, incorporated into the demand of the Other, it is lost within such demand that devours it" (p. 82).
It is essential in the treatment of anorexia mental that the lawsuit can begin to come into play for the subject as a request for help, that is, to cause the subject to ask for something from the Other and consent to enter the open circuit of the signifier. In this way, the psychoanalytic device is offered as a function of symbolic regulation of the relationship between the subject and opaque jouissance. This function aims to attenuate the rigidity of such a relationship to detach from being, via the reading of anorexia as a symptom, from the deadly effects of narcissistic specularization and producing a way of work oriented to deliver what is required to realize, or at least make possible, the desire of the subject.
Conclusions
Whether in neurotic forms or in psychotic forms, mental anorexia, as an action, is a defense against the suicidal act, but also a devastation. It is a defense against the confusion of the parents between hunger and love or against the invasion produced by the will to enjoy the Other. But it is a devastation by affirmation of the hypertrophic ideal of the thin body, by the extreme ways in which this defense is given as death of desire. Thus, the clinic of excessive jouissance is not the clinic of desire. We can consider in anorexia a prelude to a symptom that requires, of course, a training work that the professional psychologist has to know how to channel and accompany.
We have tried to show that although mental anorexia apparently moves away from the possibility of addressing it with Freud's teaching in that Freud taught us that the foundation of the social bond, that is, the basis for a subject to enter into the bond with the Other is that the subject is obliged to lose a portion of jouissance, in anorexia mental the subject has consented to lose or give that portion of jouissance, we have shown that mental anorexia is precisely a delivery of jouissance, a way of defending against excess, it is a renunciation of jouissance, although condensed and lacking in discursive unfolding.
That is why the subject with anorexia is not exempt from suffering. Thus, our conclusion is that in anorexia mental the symbolic order is not absolutely absent. We wonder if this conclusion could also apply to other symptoms of the time such as gambling, betting or the frantic use of virtual reality. It is a question that is collected from the discussion that we have raised, that anorexia mental constitutes a form of symptom, perhaps it can enter the imprecise set of the "new forms of the symptom", typical of the hypermodern society that question the permanence of the classic pictures of psychopathology.
These new forms of the symptom, new in comparison to the Victorian era of Freudian clinical records, are aligned with the mode of jouissance of the era that Lacan has called capitalist. The logical basis of anorexia is the rejection of the unconscious, the inconsistency of the Other, the jouissance outside of speech, the rupture of the social bond in replacement of the addicted jouissance of the subject alone, characteristics that are revealed to be defining in the bond of the subject with the new objects of jouissance proposed by the market in countries of advanced capitalism. According to this modality, it is possible to enjoy the object in a total way, without going through the networks of the symbolic Other. However, we have shown that anorexia mental refers to the laws of the Other to make such a libidinal experience an experience no longer total, but partial from the passion for the object to nothing.
If we assume that anorexia mental is a form of symptom then we cannot conclude that in it a modality of enjoyment not regulated by the formative action of the symbolic Other prevails, we cannot say that in anorexia mental a modality of enjoyment without the Other prevails, founded on that full jouissance, not deficit. We have shown that anorexia mental is not confused with hysteria, but also that anorexia is linked to neurosis in that the Other is present in the anorexia symptom.
Our proposal of approach is that the psychoanalyst offers himself as the Other, the recipient of a word that protests in a premature state, the recipient of a weakened desire, of an extinguished fighting spirit, to shake the resignation of the capacity of decision and offer himself as a soldier of war against the extreme obedience to the ideal of control of behavior through cognition.
Conclusions
Whether in neurotic forms or in psychotic forms, mental anorexia, as an action, is a defense against the suicidal act, but also a devastation. It is a defense against the confusion of the parents between hunger and love or against the invasion produced by the will to enjoy the Other. But it is a devastation by affirmation of the hypertrophic ideal of the thin body, by the extreme ways in which this defense is given as death of desire. Thus, the clinic of excessive jouissance is not the clinic of desire. We can consider in anorexia a prelude to a symptom that requires, of course, a training work that the professional psychologist has to know how to channel and accompany.
We have tried to show that although mental anorexia apparently moves away from the possibility of addressing it with Freud's teaching in that Freud taught us that the foundation of the social bond, that is, the basis for a subject to enter into the bond with the Other is that the subject is obliged to lose a portion of jouissance, in anorexia mental the subject has consented to lose or give that portion of jouissance, we have shown that mental anorexia is precisely a delivery of jouissance, a way of defending against excess, it is a renunciation of jouissance, although condensed and lacking in discursive unfolding.
That is why the subject with anorexia is not exempt from suffering. Thus, our conclusion is that in anorexia mental the symbolic order is not absolutely absent. We wonder if this conclusion could also apply to other symptoms of the time such as gambling, betting or the frantic use of virtual reality. It is a question that is collected from the discussion that we have raised, that anorexia mental constitutes a form of symptom, perhaps it can enter the imprecise set of the "new forms of the symptom", typical of the hypermodern society that question the permanence of the classic pictures of psychopathology.
These new forms of the symptom, new in comparison to the Victorian era of Freudian clinical records, are aligned with the mode of jouissance of the era that Lacan has called capitalist. The logical basis of anorexia is the rejection of the unconscious, the inconsistency of the Other, the jouissance outside of speech, the rupture of the social bond in replacement of the addicted jouissance of the subject alone, characteristics that are revealed to be defining in the bond of the subject with the new objects of jouissance proposed by the market in countries of advanced capitalism. According to this modality, it is possible to enjoy the object in a total way, without going through the networks of the symbolic Other. However, we have shown that anorexia mental refers to the laws of the Other to make such a libidinal experience an experience no longer total, but partial from the passion for the object to nothing.
If we assume that anorexia mental is a form of symptom then we cannot conclude that in it a modality of enjoyment not regulated by the formative action of the symbolic Other prevails, we cannot say that in anorexia mental a modality of enjoyment without the Other prevails, founded on that full jouissance, not deficit. We have shown that anorexia mental is not confused with hysteria, but also that anorexia is linked to neurosis in that the Other is present in the anorexia symptom.
Our proposal of approach is that the psychoanalyst offers himself as the Other, the recipient of a word that protests in a premature state, the recipient of a weakened desire, of an extinguished fighting spirit, to shake the resignation of the capacity of decision and offer himself as a soldier of war against the extreme obedience to the ideal of control of behavior through cognition.
