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Presenter: The patient is an eighteen-year-old girl who has been in analysis with me for five months. Her parents, who came to see me first, said they were very worried because she was refusing to eat. She had been in treatment for a year previously with a man analyst, but had asked her father to find a woman analyst instead.
Her illness appeared to have begun when she was fifteen: she didn't want to be fat, although she was not in fact overweight. She had always had a beautiful body – as both she and her parents told me – but in order to be fashionable she wanted to be thinner.
She had had a boy-friend who lived a long way away from her home town, but she stopped seeing him and only kept in touch by letter. When she eats she prepares the food herself; she can only eat one egg or a little fish, and has the feeling that her stomach is unbearably full. She also takes strong laxatives – as many as fifteen tablets in a few days. She told me that she feels addicted to these pills which act as tranquillizers.
When I first saw her she aroused my sympathy. She shook my hand formally and said in a tense voice, “I want treatment because I am afraid I can't stop something that will kill me – but I don't know what it is.” Later she said that she was full of aggression, that people feel she is very arrogant, and that the only impression she can give to other people is one of coldness.
Bion: She feels very beautiful, like a distant star; it glistens like a diamond, like steel; it is very far away – and useless. The same thing applies to the beautiful woman, the beautiful queen whom nobody would dare to approach. If you did approach her you would find she was sterile. And somehow she knows this. On the other hand, she fears that she could become pregnant, and then her beautiful body
would swell up, she would no longer be athletic, no longer able to compete in a sort of Olympic Games.
I think this story centres on the feeling that she is a person of no importance and that she is the