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Behind TikTok’s lighthearted veneer, #SkinnyTok reveals a dangerous teenage obsession with thinness. Beneath the curated aesthetics lies unspoken suffering: a psychoanalytic reading of a digital phenomenon shaped by bodies, absence and a longing for love.
Beneath TikTok’s dance videos and colorful filters lies a darker reality, a world where adolescents are drawn into a dangerous ideal. Under the hashtag #SkinnyTok, anorexia is not just present, it is glorified. The app gives young people the tools to expose themselves, compare and become captivated by an ideal of thinness that has quietly become the norm. In this space, the body becomes a message, a stage for hidden suffering, carefully erased from view.
Behind these enticing videos, captions like “1,000 kcal a day max if you want to be pretty” lies a silent scream: when words fall silent, the body begins to speak. In this body language, the image consumes everything, even erasing the self behind it.
In 1936, Jacques Lacan introduced the concept of the mirror stage: the moment when an infant, around six months old, first recognizes their reflection. This recognition brings a foundational joy, but also a misperception. The image the child sees is not truly themselves, it is external and idealized. Thus, the ego is formed on a misrecognition, an illusion of control over a body that can never be fully mastered.
With TikTok, this illusion is amplified. The mirror is no longer static, it moves, scrolls, flickers and evolves. The adolescent is no longer alone with their reflection but immersed in an anonymous, algorithm-driven collective. They no longer see themselves directly, but through the eyes of a faceless, omnipotent Digital Other. The image becomes a command that confines and the frustration turns into a norm.
For Sigmund Freud, symptoms, such as phobias, obsessions or other bodily disorders, are always compromises: they are painful solutions to inner conflicts that the individual cannot fully symbolize. With this understanding, anorexia is no longer a mere eating disorder, it becomes a way to express suffering differently.
Both children and adolescents face conflicting inner tensions: dependence and the need for separation, the desire for love and the fear of fusion. When words fail to give meaning to these struggles, the body steps in. Refusing to eat becomes a rejection of relationship—often that with the mother, since nourishment is its symbolic extension. It is a way of saying, “I want to exist without you, even if it means disappearing.”
In this way, the anorexic strives to master their body to assert their existence in a world that overwhelms them. Yet this ideal is nothing but an illusion, always at risk of failure, since desire inevitably slips away. By glorifying extreme control, TikTok fuels the fantasy of total independence.
In 1920, Freud introduced the concept of the death drive, or Thanatos: a compulsion to return to a prior state, an absolute peace free from tension. It manifests through repetitive, self-destructive behaviors where pleasure seems absent, yet a form of satisfaction—a “deadly jouissance”—persists. #SkinnyTok is structured around this drive. Videos flood the feed, slogans endlessly repeat: “You don’t deserve to eat today,” “Drink water when you’re hungry,” “Look at your belly in the mirror.” This repetition acts as ritual. The algorithm becomes a stage and the content, a mantra. Anorexia turns into performance, suffering into a measure and exhaustion into a goal.
In this context, the body slowly becomes hollowed out. It no longer feels or lives, it displays. The image replaces what is really felt. This creates a dissociation, a split between the body as felt and the body as seen—what Françoise Dolto called the unconscious body image. This image can become persecutory if not sustained by strong emotional bonds. Behind the refusal to eat lies a cry for love, one that cannot be directly expressed. Lacan reminded that “all discourse is discourse to the Other.” The person posting a #SkinnyTok video is not speaking to themselves. They send an often-unconscious message, “Look at me, love me, recognize me.” The emaciated body becomes a silent love letter, a way of saying, “I am willing to do anything for you to see me.” This dynamic is sacrificial. It belongs to what psychoanalysis terms the desire of the Other: the self exists only through what it imagines the Other expects. And if it believes the Other demands suffering, then suffering will follow.
The symptom is a survival attempt. Freud saw it as an imperfect solution to unbearable psychic conflict. It is a defense that deserves to be heard. In truth, the anorexic does not say, “I want to be thin,” but rather, “I can’t find my place.” She does not say, “I am in control,” but rather, “I no longer want to depend.”
#SkinnyTok exposes the failures of the adult world—a society that values individualism, performance and image but deprives adolescents of the symbolic means to exist otherwise. Families, schools and medical institutions struggle to provide a space where young people can openly speak, where the body is not immediately judged or corrected.
#SkinnyTok is far more than a fleeting trend. It is the modern symptom of a deeper malaise: the distress of youth who feel either too much or not enough in a world where the body is both a showcase and a battleground. Anorexia does more than strip away weight, it erases connections, words and presence in the world.
Psychoanalysis teaches us that every subject is marked by lack, desire and doubt—fractures that lie at the heart of our humanity. In a world where algorithms simplify everything, we must reintroduce complexity and nuance. We must bring words where there are only images.
Only then will these adolescents be allowed to exist without fading away.
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