Eating disorders in adult patients: dream oneself in becoming

Clinical material from the analysis of a patient suffering from Eating Disorders will be discussed in this paper, with a particular emphasis on the dreams that were emerging during the therapeutic work. These dreams were giving life to the feared void that the patient felt inside herself and was used to fill with food or with desire of fusion with another. In the course of the analysis they slowly evolved into affects and emotions, aspects of herself that the patient was not able to tolerate. The more the patient was able to dream, and then to feel, the less she needed to resort to her eating disorder in order to escape from a split off part of her internal world that she had known so far as a “void”.