“Chasing the High: The Addictive Longing for Happiness in Eating Disorders and Addictions”

In the consulting room, we often hear a familiar refrain—spoken or unspoken—by patients struggling with eating disorders or addictions: “If only I could feel good all the time.” There is a yearning for happiness, for lightness, for some euphoric state that will lift them out of the pain, confusion, or deadness they carry inside.

Whether it takes the form of the starvation-induced high of anorexia, the numbing cycles of bulimia, the chemical intoxication of substance use, or the compulsive thrill of performance and perfection, what lies beneath is often the same: a search for a momentary escape from psychic despair.

But psychoanalysis suggests that this pursuit of happiness—when compulsively repeated—can be less about pleasure and more about defending against unbearable psychic states. The question is not only why do patients chase happiness so intensely? but what are they running from?

The Illusion of the „Perfect Feeling“
In the culture we live in, happiness is marketed as a right, a destination, even a product. But for many patients, especially those with eating disorders or addictions, happiness becomes something else entirely: a fix, an idealized state that must be attained at all costs and maintained against all odds.

These „high“ states often feel like salvation. Patients describe moments of control, euphoria, achievement, lightness, or disappearance as “the only time I feel alive.” Yet these feelings are fragile, fleeting, and often followed by collapse—shame, emptiness, self-reproach, or panic.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, such states are often manic defenses—not true joy, but a way of evacuating unbearable feelings. As Melanie Klein (1940) observed, manic states can protect the ego from depressive anxiety, guilt, and internal chaos. They are a psychic flight from a painful inner world.

Eating Disorders and Addictions as Emotional Shortcuts
In both eating disorders and substance addictions, the body is often used as a medium to regulate what the mind cannot bear. The starving body becomes a source of false triumph. The binge-purge cycle creates a temporary illusion of mastery. Drugs, alcohol, or compulsions numb, distract, or inflate.

Underneath these patterns lies a desperate longing for regulation, meaning, and connection—but also an avoidance of vulnerability, dependency, and mourning. As John Steiner (1993) wrote, patients may retreat into pathological organizations of the psyche to avoid contact with intolerable psychic reality. The „high“ becomes a way to not feel.

The Origins of the Addictive Pursuit
Often, this compulsive search for happiness is rooted in early relational experiences. If a child grows up in an environment where emotional attunement is inconsistent or absent, feelings may become dangerous. Joy might feel fleeting or untrustworthy; grief may go uncontained; needs may be met with rejection.

In such cases, the psyche may split between idealized states of bliss and persecutory experiences of despair. The patient learns to cling to moments of imagined perfection and to evacuate or bypass anything that feels too real, too painful, or too human.

As Bollas (1987) suggests, patients may search not for an object or relationship, but for what he calls the transformational object—something (or someone) that can magically change their internal state. Addictions and eating rituals can be used in this way: not for nourishment or pleasure, but as tools of transformation.

Working Through the Longing
In treatment, the analyst may become the object onto which this longing for happiness is projected. The patient may hope the analyst will provide the “perfect” interpretation, the “right” mood, or the “ideal” containment that will finally make everything better. And when this fails—inevitably—it can feel devastating.

The task is not to fulfill the manic hope, but to survive its collapse. To remain present when the euphoria fades and help the patient symbolize what lies beneath: the grief, the fear, the loneliness. This means staying with the feelings that the “high” was designed to avoid.

Through repeated emotional experiences in the transference, patients may gradually learn that happiness does not need to be chased or forced. It can emerge spontaneously—often quietly—when pain is no longer feared, and when the self is no longer split between perfection and despair.

References
Klein, M. (1940). Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States. In The Writings of Melanie Klein, Vol. I–IV. London: Hogarth Press.
Steiner, J. (1993). Psychic Retreats: Pathological Organizations in Psychotic, Neurotic and Borderline Patients. London: Routledge.
Bollas, C. (1987). The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. London: Free Association Books.