When hunger strikes: Rethinking kafka’s“a hunger artist” in light of winnicott’s theory of the psyche–soma

Winnicott’s perspective on psychosomatic illness as a phenomenon that bridges the unconscious and the conscious will be discussed using, using clinical material and Kafka’s short story “A Hunger Artist.” The author makes use of Winnicott’s ideas in discussing the idea that psychosomatic symptoms, or illness, are not necessarily a form of acting out in need of elimination, but a nonverbal “language” in need of a listener. The author describes clinical cases in which the psychosomatic symptom was treated as a sign of something that went wrong within the mother–infant relationship, which has awaited a good-enough environmental provision to enable the creation of a new meaning.