Anorexia as a heart disease

Lacan has taught us the vision of the double mirror, to explain how the drive is mastered by the mirror-image starting from an early age.

The infant, up until then pure like an ocean of the void, full of tendencies and feelings, comes to stand over these feelings through the creation of an imaginary full-body image of itself, which it constructs with the help of the mirror.

This image, I have called the shadow, I have also called it the devil, as it seems it exists only for reasons of mastery through repression.

We can ask ourselves if it is truly ‘us’ mastering ‘ourselves’, or if it is the image that has a life of its own, repressing our emotions and memories, feelings and experiences against our own wish for well-being.

Concerning this mirror-image, Lacan has used the expression of Arthur Rimbaud that ‘je est un autre’, I as another.

In previous writings I have tried the dangerous undertaking of comparing psychoanalysis to religion. I have tried to argue that we are merely using different languages, different concepts, to point to one and the same basic and fundamental human problem, that who we see in the mirror is not the same being as the one looking in the mirror. The one who is aware of the mirror-image is not the same as the object he or she is aware of.

However, the object grows, the illusion, for it is not there in the real world, grows a whole palace of mirrors, what Lacan has called the imaginary, and which comes to overlay and master the being of the real, our primary consciousness.

I have called this the shadow, because I believe that our original consciousness is a form of light. It is the light that shines on the shadow, clothing itself in darkness and dimming, diminishing, killing even the consciousness of our primordial experience.

It is a relief, and a burden, that the repressed always returns. The mastery fails. The illusion does not get away with the repression and hiding, masking of the emotion. The feelings live on, and they surge up once again through what Freud has called the workings of the unconscious, the symptoms.

To return to the matter of religion, the mirror image promises a certain power, and it seduces us to invest our love in itself. It convinces us to sell our souls at an early age, in return for the power it promises. The power to be rough and tough, to be free from emotions. The power to kill our experience of compassion and to be ruthless, heartless and mean. To be fake.

So to say we invest our libido in the image of the body is another way perhaps of saying we sell our souls to the devil.

However, this has very negative consequences for our true and healthy experience of life and the world all around us.

Denying what we feel and hiding our heart may be necessary to survive in this world, and it may even make us powerful, but in the end it causes a lot of problems. We do not react authentically, we leave behind the wisdom of the heart.

And the heart, it speaks too, it is the speaking of the heart which is sought in analysis. The listening to the inner life and what our true feelings are and have been. And restoring that authority.

So the fight is, if you will, between authenticity and the façade, between who we are and who we portray ourselves to be.

I write this story with the image of my niece very much in mind. She suffered from anorexia at a youthful age and killed herself because she could no longer live with the confusion and the pressure at the early and very young age of 14.

Can psychoanalysis say anything about her problems? I don’t know.

Because psychoanalysis, since Lacan, is all about words, about ‘signiifiers’.

Before, Freud still talked about repression and energy, and it was more a theory which you could feel into. However, I find it very confusing that Lacanian psychoanalysis wants to make us believe emotions are nothing but words being switched for other words. This may seem so in listening to the stories, but I believe it is very much a matter of energy and a struggle even between god and the devil.

I believe it is dangerous to be a scientist. This is a very complicated matter I believe, for science has its uses and it surely has its benefits. This is especially true when we are talking about the creative aspects of science. But science also has a very dark side. It can kill a lot and be totally devoid of emotions.

So many psychoanalysts, especially in the Lacanian school, say we should not talk about emotions in psychoanalysis, because psychoanalysis is scientific and emotions are not.

I believe in this way, psychoanalysts become Nazis. To the Nazis, there were also no emotions, and psychoanalysis, trying to establish itself as a science, may be justifying a sort of Nazi-regime that makes it possible for other scientists to be doing their experiments in a heartless atmosphere. Not to mention the whole destruction of the heart and emotion that was the general victory of the Nazi-ideology. It’s always just a word.

Do we, as psychoanalysts, want to be on the side of the devil and kill of all recognition of emotion? How good can a psychology be, if it is denying the existence of emotions and the heart as a premise of its own core theory? And is it necessary, to be scientific?

So can psychoanalysis help the anorectic, that is my question.

For I believe, in the anorectic, it is a very fundamental struggle playing itself out. It is the struggle for the killing, for the death of consciousness, the anesthesia of the soul, putting our awareness to sleep. It is the ambition of the body-image, resistance, to fully exert its own authority.

So it is, in a way, the devil trying to have the last word. And the last word is ‘I feel nothing’. Anorexia is like a Nazi-disease. The disease of eradicating all emotion, and living fully in the sphere of the imaginary, illusion, pretense.

I you believe it.

For the unconscious returns, and that is where we find the binge eating that is so common in eating disorders. The soul wants to feel emotion, the soul wants to live and to feel that it is alive. It wants to experience things, it is curious like a little puppy, for discovering and learning, and for getting to know the world. The soul wants to sense, wants a thrill, seeks and thirsts for emotion and the life of experiencing life. The soul wants to know the soul. To grow rich in experience.

So for the person with an eating disorder, the return of the authority of the divine soul, is where he or she stuffs himself or herself with food, crazy hungry to feel something, to fight away the inner death of their emotional lives, their hearts and souls.

It is common knowledge, and people talk about emotional eating. This is a very appropriate term.

But repression also returns, and there is the guilt, the shame that the ego preaches. It fights for its authority not to experience emotion, it fights for the keeping of a dead inner landscape, a wasteland. So it tries to keep consciousness from uprising, it struggles to keep the soul dead. That is the essence of repression, the wiping out of all emotion.

It was also the essence of World War 2 and it seems to be the ambition of the Lacanian community itself unfortunately.

If we take away our hearts, our emotionality, what are we left with? A poor island of nothingness, which is not the nothingness the Buddha has talked about, for sure. For the Buddha said we are pure awareness, we are consciousness itself, embodied in man as it is embodied in all things.

To the Buddha, the heart was sacred.

To the ego, it is the enemy.

So my niece died in a terrible war, in the war of feeling vs being dead on the inside. Her disease was in fact a pure fight against resistance, which needed to keep her soul dead on the inside. And she had a beautiful soul.

Therapy, which is now too late for her but maybe not for others, would consist of classic psychoanalytic therapy: talking through, going through, working through the repressed emotion. Experiencing life again. Living up on the inside, and growing into a full recognition of the wisdom and authority of the heart.

There is no need to keep our feelings dead. It may be something that brings us power and wealth in the physical world, but as I said it brings us problems as well, many problems when we sell our souls.

If there is anything I would like to say to people, all the people, is that emotions are real, and they are our guide and intuition, and if you strongly have them and feel them, then be grateful for your wealth and your beauty. For it is the maturity and strength of your soul which shows itself as the speaking of your heart.

And never sell it. Never sell it for even the greatest promises of riches of power. For they will pass but your soul is yours for all eternity.

When you start your life, you are divine, and when you end it, be sure to have lived your divinity, be sure you have been wise, loving and compassionate. You have been strong and stood by yourself. You have stood up for what you believe in. And stand up against the devil, who is telling you to be quiet and be someone else. Be this nice picture that everyone wants to see.

Don’t keep yourself dead for keeping up appearances, please people, live your life, believe in your heart, stay strong and don’t conform to some image that is something in your head controlling you.

Don’t let the ego control your feelings, don’t let the need to be like this or that keep you away from life. And if you find this hard, try it one step at a time. Grow. Become bigger, become as large as the universe. For all is one beating heart, all is one love, and it is love we are born to be.

Fuck the devil.