Body Identity Search: The Suspended Body

The morphological transformations that occur during adolescence with rapid rhythm have an unprecedented psychological resonance and it is of fundamental importance to understand the way in which they are lived, perceived and elaborated.These fast body changes and the related social pressures make young people paying more attention to their physical appearance. Among the changes that the adolescent must face are: accepting their own body, acquiring a social role, establishing new relationships with peers,achieving emotional independence from parents. All of this is not always easy and many times they face a so difficult path that can produce the onset of some mental pathologies. Typical disorders that adolescents can face are the ones related to food. In these pathologies there is an isolation of the soul which corresponds to an alienation from the body: what remains in this loneliness is the gap between the idealized body and the objectified body. In this process of identity determination the idealized body is not able to relate to the real body (Cuzzolaro 2017). The dimension of their own body and the ability to meet the other bodies in the world are compromised; the only possible knowledge is represented by the impoverishment of their own subjectivity and by the attempt to recover it at an abstract level. Adolescents live in a condition of temporal suspension: the future is compromised and the past is demonized; what remains is a present moment made eternal by an indefinitely suspended instant (Juli 2018). Too fat for the anorexic, repulsive for binge eating; Merleau-Ponty already in 1945 expressed the concept of corporeality by using the following simple and very effective statement: "I am my body". This statement highlights the centrality of the body, of the person and his/her identity; this aspects are highly conflicting and, at the same time, pathologically united, in eating disorders.