Eating is related to the need for strength. The 'weak ego' seems weak in a physical as well as psychological sense. The compulsive eater may be diminishing his anxieties aroused by paranoid fantasies. His oral cannibalistic wishes are gratified and denied at the same time; it is as if the object were not really destroyed by the magic gesture of eating. It is neither incorporated nor lost. Obesity is the reverse of depression. Some persons are 'addicted' to certain foods. The nature of these foods is determined by the ideal imagoes of the 'addict'.