Anorexia Nervosa, Psychic Death, and the Subjugation of Need

ABSTRACT

The entropic body is a body-state that develops against a background of early trauma in which the environment has failed to regulate the child’s anxiety, leaving her unable to regulate her own anxiety or to turn to others for help in doing so. The term refers to Freud’s conception of the death drive as aiming toward a state of tension reduction. In this paper, I describe how the anorexic patient’s subjugation of need aims at the phenomenological sphere highlighted by the notion of the death drive, which is felt to offer a path toward relief from annihilation anxiety and a particular form of gratification. In anorexic patients, the dialectical relationship between the forces of life and death has broken down and the pull toward psychic death has become increasingly compelling.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The term “death drive” is used as a translation for the German “Todestrieb” as opposed to Strachey’s use of “death instinct” in the Standard Edition.

² At that time, and continuing into the present work, I intentionally set aside Freud’s speculations about the biological foundation of the death drive which though intriguing strikes me as both highly speculative and unhelpfully reductive and instead focus upon the “function of death in psychic reality” (Mills, 2006, p. 375). In this sense, I am approaching the death drive as a purely psychological, instead of biological or psycho-biological, phenomenon.

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Tom Wooldridge

Tom Wooldridge is Chair in the Department of Psychology at Golden Gate University as well as a psychoanalyst and board-certified, licensed psychologist. His books include Understanding Anorexia Nervosa in Males: An Integrative Approach, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders: When Words Fail and Bodies Speak (Relational Perspectives), and the forthcoming Eating Disorders (New Introductions to Contemporary Psychoanalysis). He is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, the Scientific Advisory Council of the National Eating Disorders Association, is Faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology, an Assistant Clinical Professor at UCSF’s Medical School, and in private practice in Berkeley, CA.