Obesity and Psychology: How is This Disorder Related to Emotions?

Obese patients who come to psychological consultation do so seeking to understand something about their pathological relationship with food they want to be able to put words to what happens to them but that they do not understand, that they cannot control and that is presented to them as something much stronger than themselves.

Most of them have already undergone various previous techniques and treatments without achieving permanent results and come to consult as a last attempt. But this time dragging along the collateral damage that his previous attempts have generated. That is why they come to the consultation already frustrated, without much hope in the process, sometimes very anxious or distressed.

Eating disorders, including obesity, are very common in consultations today and their growing increase in the population is shocking. However, despite the above, it is difficult to get a clear idea of ​​what is at stake in these patients beyond of weight gain and BMI. I consider that there are many things that move around these contemporary sufferings and that is why in this psychology and mind article I would like to do a new reading about obesity.

No obesity is the same as another

In order to approach obesity from another angle, it is first necessary to get rid of this false idea of ​​generic universality from where we usually understand it. Obesity never occurs equally for everyone there are differences in weight, IMG, different causes that trigger it, different structures in which it occurs, different ways of enjoying food and also different ways of relating to it.

This is why the coordinates only serve as that, guidelines to read what is happening or what it could be related to, but always taking into account that the final reading can only be made after analyzing each case from its own particularity. Something very important to know is that obesity is usually presented as a self-therapeutic solution that the person finds to deal with their anguish.

In that sense “Food dependence is an attempted treatment, a solution that the subject finds on his way to facing something unbearable” (Cosenza) and this is often the reason why the person clings so much to their excesses with food, even when these later cause discomfort.

Here many things come into play, including a kind of dependence on food, which presents with the same characteristics as other addictions (such as alcohol or drugs). There is a devouring instinctual excess towards food and an inability to set limits to it. In other words, it is as if there were a very great force that comes from within the subject and will drive him to consume the food and not feel calm without that consumption, an unconscious demand that demands satisfaction and in the face of which the person inevitably lets himself go.

Another characteristic feature is a psychological circuit that goes from absolute permissiveness to extreme severity The person allows himself to eat without limits, but then he undergoes very severe extreme treatments, strict diets, operations or various treatments, which is accompanied by a very punishing internal dialogue.

Food and its libidinal charge

Eating pathology is very complex because it contains many registers involved in it, among them; need, desire and libidinal-drive satisfaction and these are always brought into play in the object of food and in the act of eating by the obese person.

Since Freud’s early sexual theories, we know that food is libidinally charged. We initially receive food from an eroticized object that satisfies a drive and that constitutes the first encounter with an Other (the mother).

In simple words, breastfeeding was the first way we received food, but along with it we received many other things; We received smells, sensations, affection, looks, we learned through him to regulate our emotional states, we were able to recognize ourselves as a subject of desire, we were able to enroll in the interhuman relationship, achieve a symbolic exchange and we received with him the first gift of love and above all Regarding this last point, if we stop at the fact that food could then be perceived as a sign of love and we know that with respect to the sign of love that we feel in childhood there is an inevitable initial frustration, which is what will mark the frustrations of subsequent love as the basis of all the subject’s demand, we can read that in the absence of the sign of love as a signifier of the Other’s desire, the subject uses food in a kind of imaginary compensation.

emotional hunger

Cosenza in his book “Food and the Unconscious” postulates that a key vision for understanding obesity is the fundamental thesis of obesity as a pathology of orality presented by Karl Abraham. In it a distinction is developed between two types of hunger; physiological hunger and neurotic hunger. Physiological hunger is the need to consume food in order to survive and is based on necessity.

Neurotic hunger appears independently of stomach filling, it arises irregularly and unexpectedly, it erupts as an anguishing need and brings with it other sensations that are very different from those we feel when faced with the hunger that comes from the need to nourish ourselves Cosenza proposes that the search for excess food is the effect of the person’s desire to return to a previous stage where they experience satisfaction (very great and on many levels) with food and then compulsive food intake functions as a substitute practice that calms your discomfort.

An unconscious, automatic and spontaneous response of the subject to what frustrates their experience of satisfaction, which leads to excessive deregulation, where “binge eating is understood as a radical loss of control, as precipitation in the eating act, as a crisis without brake, like a fall into uncontrollable devouring.” (Cosenza).

Difficulties in relationships

A very important feature that is often overlooked is that, in all dependencies, including food dependence, there is a enjoyment that is satisfied alone and that therefore excludes the Other. The person usually locks himself alone with food (or the object that calms his anguish), there is an autoerotic enjoyment that makes the person begin to lock himself in and isolate himself.

If we think about it, addicted people do not usually consume socially and if they do, they quickly look for a way to disconnect and two things happen here: A refuge from anguish is found in the object of addiction that functions as a kind of protection against the threat posed by the other

This is why Cosenza points out that the clinic of excess (or the clinic of addictions) presents a pathology in relation to the other and postulates that the deregulation of food must always be analyzed in light of the relationship with the bond that the subject who suffers from obesity structure with others, only in this way can it be understood that the subject uses food as an unconscious, although pathological, solution.

The inability to say no

In the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, people who suffer from obesity problems usually have a special relationship with respect to the demand of the other, who perceive it as an imperative to which they must respond They tend to submit to what the other person asks of them in a sacrificial way and cannot say no or disobey that request that they perceive as a superego mandate, to which they feel forced to respond and provide a solution.

This difficulty in separating the other’s desire from their own desire and the inability to say no without feeling guilty is what often directs them to consumption as a way to compensate for the emotions that this generates in them.

The other side of being “everything for the other” is being “nothing for oneself” and some of this appears. That is why, faced with the need to respond to the other’s demand, an overshadowing of one’s own desire appears. The obese person usually avoids, rejects or denies their own desire and the reasons for this have to do with the fact that this substantial and extreme availability to the demand of the Other, frees the subject from the responsibility of deciding what they want, from their desire. particular and in contrast the desire of the subject is absorbed or incorporated into the demand of the Other, that is, it is lost within that demand.

Hypernutrition allows these types of people to deal with and sustain the alienating effects of the imaginary dominance of the Other over themselves works as I said before in a kind of compensation and that even though the person regrets it, they need it to be able to cope with the entire previous circuit that they cannot give up.