[Drug addiction, anorexia: what is the connection?]

Drug addictive and anorexic behaviours come from a same desire to reach an eventual autonomy. Drug addicts and anorexic people fight against dependency by instituting a new dependency, the one which ties them up to their behaviours; nevertheless this substitution from one dependency to another one does not happen by chance, it is chosen by these adolescents in order to allow them a possible structuring modification. These latter having difficulties to internalize "the father's law" in a certain way prepare the ground on which the law will become real by setting up a new alienating situation. In a way, drug addictive and anorexic behaviours carry out a "paternal metaphor" that is to say a metaphor which substitutes the "no of the father" to the place first symbolized by the operation of the mother's absence.