Starvation and “The Dead Baby”

“A pain — so utter” — Dickinson's image may be used to speak of the edges of existence, where the body and elemental mind no longer hold together, where one is dropped “bone by bone” into the abyss. I learned well into their psychoanalyses that two patients had histories of failure to thrive as infants. Another suffered a period of non-feeding during weaning. Another experienced severe parental neglect, which included periods of not being adequately fed. Some developed eating disorders later in life; others had forms of addictive behavior or somatic anxieties. In this paper, I will discuss four cases, one in more length. While they vary in degree of starvation, each patient deeply re-engaged sensations and meanings of hunger during analysis, and each had experienced a form of psychic death in which the nascent subject did not survive. In these patients, an abiding zone of deadness emerged during psychoanalysis and seemed to reflect the experience of starvation and its aftermath. All also suffered forms of emotional deprivation, but the added experience of physical hunger accentuated the trauma and carried them into an abyss where full survival was not possible.

In the setting of severe neglect, some children may die a psychic death, which is often knowable only in retrospect, pieced together out of fragments of sensation and fantasy, transference, and dream: the feared disaster that has already occurred (Winnicott, 1974). In its aftermath, as with any severe trauma occurring in infancy, no wholeness is possible. As Dickinson's poem suggests, the child may undergo a massive dissociation so that this territory becomes covered with trance: memory does not register the horror. The