Sensing and making sense of the anorexic body

Abstract

Objective
This study aims at describing the physical experience felt during anorexia nervosa and understanding the sense anorexic sufferers attribute to behaviours of dietary restriction and purgation present in this kind of eating disorder.

Methods
Ethnography and the biographic method were used to follow eight anorexia sufferers to obtain a detailed description of the content of their experience with the illness. Interviews, letters and diaries were used to reconstruct the narrative of their life stories. The field work was done in Curitiba (PR) Brazil, from January to September of 2003.

Results
The phenomenological approach used in the study privileges the experience as told by the patient who uses the reconstruction of his or her life story to bring up what he or she experienced. In this discussion, the body assumes a central role because it is not only the foundation and condition for the individual to take part in the social world, but also the foundation for the socially built experience of anorexia nervosa. The sense attributed by the individual to his or her experience is the result of the combination of his or her life story and the knowledge gained by living, together with that which is experimented through the body in an intersubjective
world. The distorted body image is directly related to one’s life experiences and the behaviours are a manifestation of the desire of changing his or her own reality.

Conclusion
This study showed that the body is an important dimension to be recognized in order to understand the process of falling ill. It also raised specific questions that need to be studied regarding the genesis of anorexia nervosa in modern Western societies. It revealed that the bodily experience in anorexia nervosa communicates a social dimension of the disease, where the meanings are always constructed and shared with people belonging to the social microcosm of the subject. Narrating this experience is, to some extent, revealing the cultural values of a society.