Suffering Bodies, Absent Speech

A Psychoanalytic Reading of Eating Disorders

Eating disorders—anorexia, bulimia, binge eating—raise questions far beyond nutrition or food-related behavior. They reveal a troubled relationship with the body, self-image, desire, and often, the Other.

As a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, I offer here a reading of these disorders through the theoretical lens of psychoanalysis and my clinical experience. The examples and names are fictional, as in my other publications. Through this reflection, I aim to clarify how, in pain, the body can become language—a medium for messages that words could not carry.

The question is not simply what the individual eats or refuses to eat, but what this behavior 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.

Psychoanalysis offers us tools to interpret this silent language. 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.” It is this articulation I wish to illuminate.

In clinical cases, the body is often invested as a shield, a projection surface. It becomes the site of conflict between identity, affect, and desire—and sometimes, the only space where existence seems able to be inscribed.

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. Analysis reveals a fantasy of transparency and erasure. Her emaciated body becomes a symbol of resistance against intrusion, sexualization, 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, driving him to seek in eating behavior a form of containment. The symptom expresses an attempt at meaning-making where language failed to symbolize the pain of absence. By reworking the unmet needs of childhood through transference, Antonin 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 here functions as a projection screen; the eating symptom acts as a numbing agent in response to unspeakable suffering. It is through verbalizing this buried experience—behind excess, behind the weight—that Rachel begins to reclaim her body, not as a barrier, but as a space of existence.

These clinical examples show that eating disorders cannot be reduced to nutritional concerns or isolated behavioral 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, representations, and internal conflicts. Thus, no single interpretation suffices; there exists a plurality of meanings to explore.

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. It ceases to be the sole locus of suffering and becomes a space for mediation, relation, and desire. The subject can then reclaim their story—not through repetition or mastery, but through speech, meaning, and encounter.