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Anorexia and bulimia, the eating disorders on the border between psyche and soma which are the subject of Gabriella Ripa di Meana's excellent book Figures of Lightness have acquired in contemporary psychopathology, and in the public's mind, a status not dissimilar to that held a century ago by hysteria, also a condition mostly affecting women: diseases of (post)modernity expressing the subject's alienation from what is conventionally expected from her - a construction of femininity, sexuality and subjective identity she does not recognize as her own.
Anorexia1 refers to deliberate self-starvation - starvation of one's self as well as of one's body - characterized by an enormous emotional investment in food, which is however ingested in amounts barely sufficient to physical survival. Bulimia, on the other hand, involves the gorging of oneself with large amounts of food, only to be expelled after a binge through self-inflicted vomiting or abuse of laxatives. Some authors (e.g. Farrell 1995) emphasize the differences between these two conditions, especially as many bulimics, unlike anorexics, manage to maintain a normal body weight. Others, including Ripa di Meana, are convinced that anorexia and bulimia - which share a narcissistic obsession with physical appearance, or rather with a distorted mental representation of it - are so intimately related to be but different manifestations of one ‘mixed, polymorphous psychopathology’ (p. 153), sometimes referred to by the neologism ‘Bulimarexic’ (Boskind-White & White 1987).
To introduce a discussion on anorexia and bulimia one would be tempted to present first some vital statistics. To say, for instance, that approximately 20% of women in our affluent Western societies suffer at some point in their lives - about 90% of them in adolescence - from a serious eating problem; that around 10% of these patients will die as a result of it; that 88% of anorexics are female, and most of them of middleclass social origin; that some 75%