The author discusses her experiences in psychoanalytic psychotherapy with adolescents who undergo rigourous athletic training, and are thus caught up in a system of power and dependancies which are inevitable if they are to suceed as champions . She rewiews various situations where food intake is deviated from its nutritionnal function and becomes the basis for a complex network of representations ( oral fixations , fetichism, magic powers ...) . Food, solid or liquid , becomes the tangible outlet for his performance-oriented tension .
The adolescent athletic achiever reveals the (...)