14

In anorexia nervosa, the mind and the body seem to agree on only one point: the rupture between them, pure and simple, not dismemberment, nor fragmentation, nor liquidation. Ms A’s mind wants to live above the contingencies, needs, and limitations of the body… or even, in the last resort, to manage without it by trying to exist in conflict with it. Her mind then corrupts itself by cutting itself off from its sensory, sensual, and affective base, and by promoting itself as a pure phenomenon of power, in an illusion of narcissistic mastery. In the course of the “monstrous” metamorphoses of puberty, the fragile former internal coherence of childhood is undermined. Ms A cannot accept the recomposition of her self if she clings in her heart to the more or less idealized nostalgia for a lost psychosomatic unity and its moments of grace and glory, or even if she “only” laments the dreamy latency that preceded adolescence.