Eating: From Physiology to the Unconscious. A Neuroscientific perspective with some literary images

Abstract

Eating, quintessence of biopsychosocial behavior, is determined by multiple factors tied to different motivational systems. Therefore, a multiplicity of intertwined perspectives is necessary and psychiatry, “frontier science”, is particularly suitable to study human eating, taking also into account other cultural and scientific approaches. As a result of the recent socio-cultural transformations the relationship with food assumed specific pathological features, unknown in the past, ranging from extreme appetite to inflexible refusal to eat. Creating a path from physiology to the unconscious, reward systems, relational meanings of eating, and the unconscious symbol of food will be discussed.