The Suffering Body: Manipulation and Discomfort in Eating Disorders

What is the meaning of piercing and tattoo in sixteen years old? What are the deep reasons, affective and relational, that explain the explosion of this "fashion" among teenagers? The recent spread of these practices among young people and very young people offered the opportunity to reflect on the value attributed to the body manipulation in teenager growth context. Inked bodies, pierced, and other similar manipulations, express a communicative intention, whose strength is proved by the violence of these practices. The sense of the message, however, risks remaining obscure to adults, who lack the tools to decode it. Self-injury begins as a general expression of a lack of integration between oneself and the alienation of one's own body, resulting in conflicting and split feelings. Many manifest a behavior of disrespect, disapproval, devaluation of the bodily ego, whose self-injurious gesture would represent a particularly dramatic expression. The variability that characterizes the manifestations of self-injury prevents one from applying to a universal definition, valid under any circumstances. Instead it reveals the conceptual flexibility of self-injury that appears itself as a peculiar product in the current historical time. In a society that increasingly accepts various forms of transformative intervention on the physicality of each, where piercing and tattoos, once considered barbaric practices, now these become ordinary practices, a distinction between ornaments and self-injuries becomes necessarily confused (Levenkron 1998). The ego leak is unnecessarily buffered, occluded, braked trough any means (food, alcohol, substances, self-injury, shopping, kleptomania) because the bets are not really the shape of the body but the possibility to escape the dissolution of the Self. Self-injury and eating disorder have many common factors: impulsive, ritualistic, hidden behavior characterized by shame and guilt. These are experiences that use the body to resolve psychological conflicts and feelings of tension, anger, loneliness and emptiness. The two syndromes report a distorted image and a deep disdain of their body, lived as an enemy to fight, punish and anesthetize. The body that gets sick is very often of a teenager. The food and the obsession with the shape of the body have a primary value because they validate the identity structure, precarious, shaky, of personality in progress. The adhesion to the symptom is understandable only from this point of view, this self-destructive research, carried out to the bitter end, would not otherwise be explained if underneath there was not the fear of the disagreement of the ego. The body becomes the refuge, the theater where you can experience the emotions that you cannot tolerate in life. The problem that revolves around the emotional life is just that: we feel that we cannot control our emotions, and unable to support them from within, we try an external control. All teenagers experience pubertal transformations in a problematic way, as accepting them requires the cognitive integration of one's body into a positive image.