Eating Disorders: Psychoanalytic Perspective Illustrated by the Film “Black Swan”

The work examines the problems of eating disorders; in the theoretical part of the work, a systematization and analysis of modern views of the psychoanalytic community on the issue under consideration is carried out. In the empirical part, based on the considered theoretical concepts, an analysis of a work of art with the corresponding theme was carried out. Eating disorders, their symptoms associated with the oral stage of psychosexual development from a psychoanalytic point of view, are often a consequence of the failure of the containing function of the mother, an attempt to compensate for the lack of love, which cannot be said, can only be expressed in the body, a peculiar form of pre-speech communication. In the empirical part of the work, the author, based on the considered psychoanalytic concepts, describes alternative options for how the symptoms of anorexia can be viewed as conversion, which refers to hysteria, or somatization, which refers to psychosomatics.