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Body politic, body beautiful, body talk, body of evidence, good body, bad body, the first ego is a body ego - we inhabit our own bodies, we experience the bodies of others, we ‘know’ carnally, but what would it be, to hate and abuse the body that houses us? Each of these books looks with its particular eye at the late twentieth-century phenomena of eating disorders, which are burgeoning particularly in the rich soil of the industrialised Northern hemisphere. Not that eating disorders are new: Understanding Eating Disorders points to the case of Frederada, a serf in the ninth century, who would ‘eat like a cow’, then utterly refuse food, and whose fixed obsessional character traits closely resembled the clinical picture of anorexia nervosa appearing in consulting rooms today. Not until 1980, however, did anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa become enshrined as separate syndromes in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM III), so focusing thinking on the experience, meaning and treatment of these disorders that wrack and ravage the body with the turmoils of the mind.
Each book speaks with a different tongue, although hung around the same central thematic post: Understanding Eating Disorders, its cover littered with weighty numbers, speaks the language of science, of research and critique, of measuring and concluding, whilst The Good Body with its velvet cover bearing a woman's form, is polyglottal, as philosophers, anthropologists, literary scholars and historians ruminate on what it is to have a body in contemporary culture. The one is an investigation, the other, a meditation.
Understanding Eating Disorders presents its menu in ordered form: an historical introduction, together with general and particular commentary on the developmental, familial and abusive aspects of these disorders, followed by sections on each of three syndromes: anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and obesity. In contrast, The Good Body fin