Além do comer: um olhar psicanalítico sobre algumas questões nutricionais

Abstract

This study discusses the nutritional treatment given mainly to people seen and diagnosed as fat or obese. Thus, this research starts from the notion that the body is not limited to the organic, physiological and palpable, but that it undergoes subjective interventions. We used the contextualisation of the concept of the body for biomedical areas, taking into account the history of the body as one that was seen as beautiful centuries ago and which today is under pressure to fit into standards established by means of statistical and aesthetic averages, with medical guidelines and concepts to help normalise this body. The question of what is considered normal or pathological arises in our research as a point of questioning the place that the fat body has been placed. Based on the psychoanalytic concepts of listening, drive and subject, we tried to outline another possible way of looking at the body that appears to be excessive, so as to see it not as abnormal, but as part of something bigger that tells the story of each subject. Considering that the person who enters a nutritional treatment is a subject in the psychoanalytic sense of the term, therefore a divided subject with a lack that cannot be satisfied, became fundamental for the inclusion of the other concepts used and for the possibility of thinking about a different way of providing care. The presentation of two clippings of clinical cases treated in a nutritional clinic were the bridge for the discussion between what nutrition predicts as a treatment and what psychoanalysis proposes to do. Our research aimed to find a different way of dealing with the subject who is undergoing nutritional treatment, seeking a rapprochement between two apparently distinct areas - nutrition and psychoanalysis. Finally, we are not presenting guidelines or a treatment model to be followed by nutritionists as a way of replacing what they do; the proposal that emerges is to open the nutrition professional's eyes to the subjectivity inherent in each subject, a subjectivity that intertwines with nutritional history and appears in the body and in eating