Anorexia: From Nothing to Real. From empty words to words with substance

Anorexia sufferers fluctuate between the fantasies of the perfect body, the unconscious demand for love, and the refusal of desire, caught between alternating states of suffering and enjoyment. What fills the body and psyche of anorexia patients is not emptiness but a particular object, the “nothing,” the “object a” as formulated by Jacques Lacan, the remnant of the lost fusion with their mother’s body. The anorexia sufferer “desires nothing and eats nothing” (J. Lacan). The authors refer to the analytical register of J. Lacan: the Borromean knot of the RSI. Real, Symbolic, Imaginary. Anorexia sufferers do not construct their body image in a harmonious way, resulting in a truncated image and a body that is denied any imaginary, symbolic, or pragmatic intrusion whatsoever. In analytical therapy coupled with art therapy and multidisciplinary work (medical and paramedical team), anorexia patients will be able to detach themselves from the images and words that have been placed on their body and substitute them with the gaze, attention, and kind words of the psychoanalyst, embodying in this transfer the “big Other.” This position, positively experienced by patients, will give more substance to their ego and will allow them to re-embody themselves in their own body, reclaimed at last.