Teenagers

Suffering Bodies, Absent Speech

Eating disorders — anorexia, bulimia, binge eating — raise questions far beyond nutrition or food-related behaviour. They reveal a troubled relationship with the body, self-image, desire, and often, the Other. The question is not simply what the individual eats or refuses to eat, but what this behaviour means to them, what it communicates in their place — sometimes from a buried history that has never been spoken. When speech is obstructed or too painful to express, the body speaks: it mimics, reenacts, substitutes. The eating symptom becomes a gesture of figuration, a way for the subject to become readable where they cannot be heard. Freud described the symptom as a compromise between drive and repression; Lacan reminds us that "the symptom is the trace of a bodily event captured in the order of language." Three Clinical Cases Anastasia (17) comes to therapy at her mother's request, due to her extreme thinness. Intellectually gifted, she rejects all medical concern. A phrase recurs in her speech: "I want to disappear without making noise." She avoids signs of femininity, distrusts bodily transformation, and appears to seek through dietary control a total mastery over her body — and ultimately, over her place in the world. Her emaciated body becomes a symbol of resistance against intrusion, sexualisation, and the gaze of the Other. Anton (24) begins therapy after a breakup that triggers renewed bulimic episodes. He describes alternating between uncontrollable urges and violent rejection as punishment: "I fill myself to hate myself afterward." His family history reveals paternal abandonment and an emotionally preoccupied mother. The unspoken affective void from childhood appears lodged in his body. By reworking the unmet needs of childhood through transference, Anton begins to articulate his experience in terms other than compulsion. Rachel (38) suffers from nighttime binge-eating. In early sessions, she describes her body as "an armor," a means to become invisible, a protection from a world perceived as threatening. Her history is marked by unprocessed traumatic events. The body functions as a projection screen; the eating symptom acts as a numbing agent in response to unspeakable suffering. Through verbalising this buried experience, Rachel begins to reclaim her body — not as a barrier, but as a space of existence. Conclusion Eating disorders cannot be reduced to nutritional concerns or isolated behavioural phenomena. They may be understood as psychic expressions where speech fails — incomplete attempts to give shape to subjective suffering. Each patient engages with the symptom in a unique way, grounded in their personal history. Psychoanalysis does not aim to erase the symptom but to elaborate it. It offers a space of listening where the symptom can be narrated, linked to intimate experience, and gradually re-integrated into a process of subjectivation. The body thereby shifts from being a passive object to a symbolic medium. The subject can then reclaim their story — not through repetition or mastery, but through speech, meaning, and encounter.