“Perfect Hunger”: Eating Disorders, Egotism, and the Optimization of the Self

“The ego is not master in its own house.”
— Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1917)
In the consulting room, the theme often arises quietly, cloaked in rationalizations:

“I’m just trying to be healthy.”
“I feel better when I’m in control.”
“It’s about discipline—nothing more.”
But beneath these seemingly benign statements, something more profound is often at play. Behind many eating disorders—whether anorexia, bulimia, bingeing, or orthorexic control—is not simply a wish to be thin or healthy, but a psychic drama involving control, self-worth, rage, and survival. In the age of self-optimization, the body becomes a battleground not just for beauty standards, but for the very right to exist.

The Tyranny of the Optimized Self
Modern culture has replaced being with becoming better. Social media, productivity influencers, and wellness industries promote an ethos where the self is an ongoing project to improve—a never-finished task. Under this gaze, food becomes data, hunger becomes suspicious, and bodily needs are treated as bugs in the software of the optimized ego.

Psychoanalytically, this can be understood as an ego ideal gone awry. Freud (1914) proposed that the ego ideal—an internalized image of perfection—is often at odds with the ego’s actual state. The greater the gap between ego and ego ideal, the more self-reproach and shame the individual may experience. In eating disorders, this gap becomes intolerable: the body itself becomes a source of moral failure.

Egotism and the False Self
At first glance, those with eating disorders may seem self-involved: meticulous about calories, workouts, or appearance. But as Winnicott (1960) might suggest, this egotism often masks a deep false self adaptation—a performance designed to maintain external validation while the true self remains hidden, undeveloped, or unprotected.

Underneath the obsessive control is not pride, but fear: If I do not manage my body, I will dissolve into nothingness. The “self” being optimized is often hollow, cobbled together from cultural ideals, family expectations, and early relational failures. The ego becomes inflated in its vigilance and collapsed in its worth.

Control as a Defense Against Psychic Chaos
Eating disorders often function as manic defenses (Klein, 1940) against psychic disintegration. When emotional regulation is fragile or undeveloped—often due to early relational trauma—controlling food and the body becomes a way to manage overwhelming affect. In particular, anorexia may be understood as a retreat from need, a refusal to acknowledge dependency, desire, or vulnerability.

Bion (1962) would describe this as an attack on linking—the capacity to think, symbolize, and process emotional experience. In this light, the calorie count becomes a stand-in for thought; control replaces feeling.

Hunger as Metaphor and Message
Hunger, in eating disorders, is not just physical. It is emotional, relational, existential. The patient is often hungry for something else entirely: recognition, containment, intimacy, freedom. But these longings are frequently disowned, projected, or displaced onto the body.

Julia Kristeva (1980), drawing on Lacan, argues that anorexia is often a rejection not of food, but of the maternal—a rebellion against the engulfing, all-consuming nature of early caregiving. To refuse food is to say: I am not yours. I will be mine. This desire for autonomy becomes entangled with the wish to disappear. The body is not simply being shaped—it is being erased.

What’s Being Eaten Away
In analytic treatment, the goal is not to restore “normal” eating, but to listen to what the symptom is saying. The question is not just why don’t you eat, but what part of yourself is being starved? Is it the sexual self? The angry self? The needy child? The mournful adult?

Eating disorders often reflect a refusal to be—to exist as an embodied, desiring subject in a world that feels unsafe or unresponsive. The patient does not only reject food—they reject their own subjectivity. They disappear in plain sight, replacing being with doing, feeling with counting, presence with performance.

Therapy as Re-feeding the Soul
In psychoanalysis, the work involves re-symbolizing the experience of hunger—making it thinkable, bearable, speakable. The therapist becomes a container not just for food anxieties, but for deeper questions of worth, identity, and survival. Slowly, the patient may come to feel that they are not just a project to improve, but a person to be met.

“The patient must come to feel that there is someone who can survive their destructiveness—and still remain present.”
— Winnicott (1947)
When that happens, control becomes less urgent, the ego ideal softens, and the body is no longer the battleground. Hunger becomes something else entirely: a message, not a threat.

References
Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.
Freud, S. (1914). On Narcissism: An Introduction. Standard Edition, Vol. 14.
Freud, S. (1917). Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Standard Edition, Vol. 16.
Klein, M. (1940). Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 21, 125–153.
Kristeva, J. (1980). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lacan, J. (1977). Écrits: A Selection (trans. A. Sheridan). New York: Norton.
Winnicott, D. W. (1947). Hate in the Countertransference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 30, 69–74.
Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press.