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Binge eating, the eating of large quantities of food in short periods of time, is quite possibly as old as mankind, and is seen today in those hunting, fishing and agricultural peoples where food availability is episodic. When the catch or harvest is good, one gorges to capacity, hoping the better to tide one over the lean times; in these cases, the practice is adaptive and certainly not pathological. The first known abuse of eating is the alternate gorging and vomiting practiced in Roman times with the primary purpose of permitting the maximum intake of food delicacies while preventing the usual outcome of obesity as well.
It is only in relatively modern times, with a plentitude of food consistently available to large numbers of people, that we begin to see pathological binge eating occur frequently enough to permit study and consideration. This practice has received little attention until the last few years, having been given only passing mention in medical and psychiatric reports. The assiduous reader may, from time to time, have encountered a description of binge eating in a psychoanalytic report dealing with anorexia nervosa, but the first detailed case study, appearing in “The Fifty Minute Hour” (Lindner, 1955), was directed to a lay audience. This was a strikingly dramatic presentation, in which Lindner explained the bingeing as the enactment of an oral impregnation fantasy.
In 1969, Stunkard reported on styles of overeating seen in obese people, one of these styles being binge eating, which he characterized as having an orgiastic character and occurring in periods of life stress