Anorexia, anxiety, and the object

Anorexia among young girls is an increasingly common phenomenon, one that raises questions of psychopathology. Anorexia at the time of puberty is not so much a rejection of femininity as an attempt to limit the "feminine jouissance," in Lacan's terminology, demarcated neither by border nor by semblance. Currently, where jouissance tends to be in control, the body and its jouissances are at the foreground, a sign of the disorientation of desire. This paper examines how we can reintroduce anorexic girls to the language of their desire and separate them from the imperatives of jouissance--which put them on a path of experiencing an Other jouissance, a feminine one, that seizes them. Mastery of the body and its experiences is an attempt to counter the limitlessness of a jouissance that surpasses them, even though this dimension determines them as women.