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The Psychotic Dimension of Anorexia-Bulimia



Serge Cottet distinguishes between a a . [21] The former refers to the lack, desire and the divided subject and is concerned with the clinic of neuroses; the latter refers tojouissance and emptiness and is concerned with the clinic of psychoses.

There is a classic doctrine on where Lacan includes it, indeed he chooses it as the paradigm of the clinic of the lack. In this perspective, the anorexic maneuver appears as oriented towards preserving the locus of lack in the Other and, therefore, in the subject. The clinic of anorexia as a clinic of lack allows Lacan to highlight the following:

a). The as “desire of nothing” makes evident the truth of the structure when it reveals that what lies at the heart of human desire is not an object—desire is never desire for an object—but nothingness as object, nothingness manifesting the inadequacy of every imaginary object in regard to the structurally metonymic inclination of human desire.

b). Anorexia shows the irreducibility of the field of need to the field of desire, for if need is the need for something, desire is , for Other thing, it is desire for Other, and precisely for that reason it cannot be reduced to need. In this sense, the hunger strike of the anorexic tries to evince the transcendence of desire in relation to the need in front of an Other (family, society) that, on the contrary, tends to crush the former onto the latter.

c). Anorexia reveals a structural because in both rejection—of the body, of nourishment—becomes a defense or a manifestation of the subject’s desire. So that the anorexic is prepared, in order for desire to survive, to give up—hysterically—jouissance, to annihilate the satisfaction of need.

d). The anorexic demand as clarifies the deep nature of the demand of love as intransitive demand. The demand of love is not a demand for something, but the demand for the sign of the Other’s lack, not the demand for the breasts but of the sign of love, as Lacan precisely points out in his Seminar IV, La relation d’objet. In anorexia the demand for love appears in its purest statute inasmuch as it is not a demand for something the Other possesses (nourishment, etc.) but for something the Other lacks, whereas anorexia’s drift shows how the absence of the sign of love—the “disappointment of the demand of love” as Lacan notes—sets the subject in motion towards its real compensation through the object that precisely fills up the bulimic.

This brief summary of Lacan’s classic doctrine on anorexia avoids considering the dimension of anorexia as psychotic instead of neurotic. We will here introduce two critical observations in order to introduce the rapport between anorexia-bulimia and

Firstly, according to the clinic of anorexia we should distinguish between the descent of desire as desire for the Other and desire as desire for nothing. If hysteria highlights desire as the Other’s desire—in the sense that the hysterical subject acts with its own lack in order to bring about the lack in the Other—, anorexia, in its psychotic dimension, emphasizes desire as desire for nothing or, as Lacan puts it, as “appetite for death.”[22] Here the subject does not work on the lack to probe its value in the Other’s desire, but rather “nothingifies”, if we may say so, the lack by reducing it to a localized emptiness, to the stomach’s emptiness. The anorexic rejection allows the survival not of desire as such, but of a kind of pseudo lack. “Pseudo” because it ends the relationship with the desire of the Other in order to be united with a radical thrust of auto-mortification. The by-product of the disconnection between lack and desire is a kind of reduction—of —of lack itself to a reified emptiness, not vitalized by phallic signification, not signified, not metaphorical. An ­emptiness that could decline into nirvanization of the subject—anorexia —, or as compulsive avidity—bulimia.

We are dealing with a new statute of We are not dealing—as in Lacan’s classical doctrine —with nothingness as the object tending to the opening of the Other’s desire, with nothingness as the separating object, but with another nothingness, nothingness as pure nothingization of the subject, of nothingness as annihilation, nirvanic de-vitalization of the subject. In this sense the Lacanian definition of anorexic desire as appetite for death ends in the abyss, in what Freud signaled as the disjunctive drive between as the pure expression of the death drive. In Lacanian terms, we could argue that this “other nothingness” is not related to the Other—as in the classical doctrine—but to the Thing.

This new classification of nothingness also constitutes the logical principle of the capitalist discourse articulated by Lacan in 1972. [23] In this discourse “everything is consumed,” on one hand the lack of the subject is constantly recycled and covered by the consumption of the object, and on the other hand the lack of the subject is endlessly kept alive by way of the continuous offering of new objects of consumption. So that the recycling of the lost object leads to a progressive absorption of the lack in the demand. The age of the capitalist discourse is our age, working as background and determining the apparition of new forms of the symptom that manifest the pathological drift of the accentuation of the convulsive and infinite character of the demand. Anorexia and bulimia aid in simplifying the incidence of the capitalist discourse in the dimension of the clinic. Anorexia and bulimia make evident the transformation of the subjective lack into a pseudo de-­objectivized lack, into an anatomized emptiness: pure real emptiness unrelated to desire.

Taken and adapted from: http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=393 for academic purposes

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