Ophelia is a little walking owl, bewitched by her unconscious feminine, her father, and what 'they say.' She never finds her own voice. She never finds her own body or her own feelings and therefore misses life and love in the here and now. Gradually the waters of the unconscious to which she is 'native and indued' swallow her.

Do you know whose colors these are? [...] These are the colors of the whore of Babylon. Red and purple.

If in later life she has mastered her hunger drive by ego control, she may assume that she can control her fate herself. But that ego may in fact be very weak,…

Her [an anorexic's] natural bent is towards perfection, purification, aesthetics. Her ideal is to remove all the superficial veils until only essence is left.