ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the question: is bulimia a phobia or an addiction, and illustrates a clinical case of Linda for answering the question. The case like Linda's offers an example of a failure happening at a crucial moment of her subjective constitution. For Linda, bulimia operated as a regulatory strategy: it was meant to reconstruct a subject in front of the failure in the paternal function. For Linda neither repression nor the return of the repressed seemed to be available: there were no formations of the unconscious, but pure suffering in the Real of the body by way of psychosomatic illnesses. Linda became very oppositional and was fighting with her mother all the time. Bulimia was a difficult element in Linda's analysis, a resisting symptom. Linda used bulimia as a way to elude the traumatic reality of a failing desire (her father's) which could not function as a metaphor for her mother's desire. Bulimia neutralized feelings for Linda.
