“Ghosts at the banquet” - Scholarly Commons Home

The Place for Emptiness
It seems a lack of self sustaining support has the self lose its feeling of
aliveness, and so there is no way to modulate intense affective states. For
whatever reasons, the infant is unable to borrow the strength of the parents.
Losses experienced (for example a loss of friendship in adolescence) leave the
self highly vulnerable to disintegrating anxiety and the fear of emptiness. In
defence of this, the self will organize a controlled emptiness by not eating, or
ruthlessly fill up with a greediness that is compulsive and feels “mad”
(Winnicott, 1974). Winnicott (1974) and Green (1986) both note that
emptiness is an essential part of psychic development and, if not experienced
at the beginning of life turns, up as a state that is feared, yet compulsively
sought after. Geist (1989) reflects on this, saying eating is related to emptiness
and so the adolescent, in trying to defend against self depletion and feelings of
emptiness, symbolically recreates the activity most closely related; eating. The
anorexia, therefore, is a symbolic recreation within the symptom; both the
danger to the self and the efforts at self-restoration. This concept of
concretization, expressing inner perceptions through the body, has also been
noted by Atwood & Stolorow (1984) and McDougal (1989) who saw the life
threatening nature of anorexia paradoxically used in the service of psychic
survival”.
Green (1986) in “Private Madness”, notes that the absence essential to psychic
development finds itself in the potential space between self and object. In this
way, Green takes Winnicott’s position, stressing the importance of the use of
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