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Over the course of the last few decades, a clinical judgment about anorexia nervosa has become a commonplace: The disease is very different from hysteria. The commonplace has now been officially registered and certified by the DSM-III, which has two completely unrelated categories, “Eating disorders” and “Somatoform Disorders, Conversion Type,” into which anorexia and hysteria fit. The syndrome known by Charcot and Janet as “anorexie hystérique” thus no longer exists—in name, if not in fact. And, recently, sociocultural historians and historians of psychiatry have ratified the clinical judgment by claiming that anorexia is to the late 20th century what hysteria was to the late 19th—both diseases are “exaggerated stereotypes of their times,” and because the two eras are so different, the diseases are, of course, different as well.
We would like to question the commonplace argument about hysteria and anorexia on theoretical grounds and in terms of sociocultural history. That is, we want to question how the separation of anorexia from hysteria came about and what assumptions from sociocultural history have recently reflected and reinforced that separation. We are not clinicians, and we are not making any argument about treatment modalities, but we do think that anorexia nervosa presents an intriguing example of how clinical, theoretical, and historical assessments intermix—and specifically of how, while psychoanalysts have tried to put the past of their science behind them, cultural historians have both followed suit and reinforced the psychoanalytic judgment.
Looking over the history of psychiatric and psychoanalytic work on anorexia nervosa, one thing is immediately obvious: Whoever stresses the