Anorexia Nervosa, Psychic Death, and the Subjugation of Need

Abstract

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.