Never Laugh at Freud

By the time I turned 25, having continuously struggled with my extra weight, I began to suspect that my excess kilograms could be the result of something larger than banal laziness and a lack of willpower.

My attempts to get to the truth by myself produced no result: I had subscribed to a bunch of quasi psychological blogs, flooded my apartment with tons of pseudo-scientific books on eating disorders – only to fall into even more despair.

I realized you can only exacerbate your complexes if you do it yourself – and honestly admitted that I needed some professional help. The Husband-psychoanalyst of one of my girlfriends helped me identify a specialist. So I went to a meeting with an expert on Freud – the very same Freud I only recently poked fun at while attending a seminar on his theory of interpretation of dreams.

During the first two or three sessions, we worked in a learning mode, after which I was scheduled to come twice a week and a real, adult psychoanalysis began: I got to lay down on a couch so I could not see the doctor and would not be distracted by his reaction while he used the method of free associations.

When I was talking non-stop about everything that was spinning in my head and expressed my turbulent emotional reactions to the brutal digging in my subconscious. When we got to the true cause of my neurosis – my feeling of guilt with respect to my dad who badly wanted a son instead of a daughter.

Amazingly, all my life I sincerely believed that I had a very warm relationship with my dad and was totally unaware that my psyche was so deeply traumatized. My dad approved only of my openly boyish behavior – fighting with other kids, climbing the trees, and my achievements in men’s sports such as shooting – thus forming an inevitable dissonance between what I was and what I would like to be – for the sake of his scarce praise.

Therefore, I was suppressing my very pronounced femininity which during my puberty completely alienated me from my father and tried in every way to behave and look like a boy.

At this point, the problem of my excess weight was explained: my unconscious needed some kind of protection from close contact with the outside world – I did not accept who I was and wished to merge with the environment, or even to die.

As soon as I was able to get rid of that feeling of guilt and accept my sexual identity, the numbers on my scales began to rapidly go down without any diets and sporting exploits – I lost around 8 kg over two and a half months of therapy.

My doctor laughed: psychoanalysis makes other extraordinary things happen to adults, some, for example, grow a few centimeters. I felt an urgent need to buy dresses and shoes with high heels, began following fashion news, added dance to my training program.

It turned out that to love oneself for the mere fact of one’s existence in this world one does not need any auto-trainings – you simply have to believe Freud: we all have come from our childhood.

Photo: Shutterstock

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