Introduction
Disorder of eating behaviour
Disorder of embodiment
Disorder of identity
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Persons with EDs experience their own body
first and foremost as an object being looked
at by another, rather than coenesthetically or
from a first-person perspective.
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Alienation from one’s own body and from one’s
own emotions,
disgust for it,
shame,
and an exaggerated concern to take
responsibility for the way one appears to the
others;
as well as the capacity to feel oneself only
through the look of the others,
through objective measures
and through self-starvation
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Many of the features of persons with EDs can
be illuminated by looking at it in the light of
the Sartrean concept of feeling a lived-bodyfor-others.
Living/Lived body (Leib)
Object body (Körper)
 Lived body for others
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The body experienced from within, my own
direct experience of my body in the first-person
perspective, myself as a spatiotemporal
embodied agent in the world.
 This is the coenesthetic apprehension of one’s
own body, the primitive experience of oneself,
the basic form of self-awareness, or direct,
unmediated experience of one’s own body.
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Chaire (Merleau-Ponty)
LIVING BODY, rather than
LIVED BODY, rather than
Dead body
 Devitalized body
 Deanimated body
 An-emotional body
 An-intentional body
 Mechanical body
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Perceived body
Objectualized body
Externalized body
Explicit Body
Pornographic body
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The body explicitly perceived and/or
thematically investigated from without, as
for example by natural sciences as anatomy
and physiology, from a third person
perspective.
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The body that can be manipulated.
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The lived-body turns into a physical, objective body
whenever we become aware of it in a disturbing
way.
Implicit=> Explicit
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Whenever our movement is somehow impeded or
disrupted, then the lived-body is thrown back on
itself, materialized or ’corporealized’.
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It becomes an object for me.
One can apprehend one’s own body as something when it is
looked at by another person.
 When I become aware that I - or better that my own body - is
looked at by another person, I realize that my body can be an
object for that person.
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Sartre: the ‘lived-body-for-others’.
“With the appearance of the Other’s look I experience
the revelation of my being-as-object”.
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The upshot of this is a feeling of
“having my being outside (…) [is the feeling] of being an object”.
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Thus, one’s identity becomes reified by the gaze of the other,
and reduced to the external appearance of one’s own body.
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Shame reveals to myself my selfhood as an
object for another (Sartre 1943).
Shame means to be utterly exposed to the
present, to the painful presence of their
devaluating gazes, to annihilating disdain and
contempt (Fuchs 2002).
Shame lowers the person’s self-respect, and may
entail either the person’s wish to hide or
disappear or, more positively, attempts to
reconstruct or improve oneself (Williams 1933).
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Shame is an affect that awakens and focuses my
attention.
When I feel ashamed, I am aware of being seen
by another person whose gaze uncovers a part
of who I am, usually a part that makes me feel
embarrassed, inadequate, dishonored and
humiliated.
The effect of shame is that it reduces the
complexity of the person that I am to one
single aspect of it: when I feel ashamed I know
that for the other I am nothing but that specific
feature of the complexities of who I am.
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One’s body as the most intimate form of
Otherness
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Involuntary aspects in human existence:
body,world, others, history
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The body as facticity and contingency
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Dialectics between oneself and one’s own
body
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‘Facticity’, including oneself as ‘this’ body, its
form, height, weight, colour, as well as one’s
past and what is actually happening.
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Having been a living bodily being before, I
now realize that I have a material (impeding,
clumsy, vulnerable, finite, etc.) body.
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The material body is transcendental to me.
It is an attribute that I can/must modify.
=> Techno-body
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The culture of late modernity promises that
one can modify one’s own material body at
one’s own will.
Part Two
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Factor 1: “Feeling oneself only through the
gaze of the other and defining oneself only
through the evaluation of the other” (GEO)
Factor 2: “Feeling oneself only through
objective measures” (OM)
Factor 3: “Feeling extraneous from one’s own
body” (EB)
Factor 4: “Feeling oneself through starvation”
(S).
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Knowing what the others think of me calms me down (15) 0.79
I can’t stand not to know what the others think of me (18) 0.89
For me it’s very important to see myself through the eyes of the
others (1) 0.80
When I meet someone I can’t stay without knowing what he thinks
of me (23) 0.78
I am dependent on the evaluation of the others (13) 0.91
Even if I think that the way the others evaluate me is wrong, I can’t
do without it (16) 0.86
The way I feel depends on the way I feel looked at by the others
(11) 0.82
Sometimes I focalize myself through the gaze of the others (7)
0.70
Seeing myself from their point of view me makes me feel very
anxious (8) 0.72
Having control on my weight means having control on
the possible changes that happen in my body (21)
0.89
 Only if I have my weight under control being looked at
by the others makes me fell allright (10) 0.85
 Having my weight under control makes me feel in
control of my emotional states (22) 0.91
 In all this confusion knowing that my weight is under
control reassures me a little bit (9) 0.77
 If my measures remain the same over time I feel that I
am myself, if not I feel I am getting lost (5) 0.77
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Sometimes, the emotions I feel are extraneous
to me and scare me (4) 0.80
 I see myself out of focus, I don’t feel myself (14)
0.86
 I see myself fuzzy/hazy, as if I had no boundaries
(6) 0.79
 The fear of change is an emotion that I can’t
tolerate (20) 0.80
 The flesh is unimportant; it doesn’t let me feel
my bones (12) 0.71
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Eating according to my own rules is the only way
to feel myself (2) 0.84
 If I could not eat the way I want I would not be
myself anymore (3) 0.86
 If I follow your dietary prescriptions I cannot
recognize myself when I look at myself in the
mirror; this does not happen if I
 do things in my own way (17) 0.73
 Changing my own eating habits scares me to
death, as any other change in my life (19) 0.71
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Feeling oneself through
the gaze of the other
Feeling extraneous
from oneself
Feeling oneself through
objective measures
Feeling oneself through
starvation
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No cenesthetic (pathic) basis for identity
Hyper-identification with one’s own body
One’s own body as:
An object looked at by the others
An object to be manipulated
The Buildung of one’s body is a way to build
one’s identity
Part Three
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I am this body, but also I am not just this
body
I am this body, but also I have that body
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Strcture of hyper-identification (with one’s
own body)
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Object-body-that-I-am
Paradoxical Lived Körper
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This-ness
Living dead
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That-ness
Dynamization of bodily boundaries: 16 patients
 Dynamization of body construction: 13 patients
 Externalization: 11 patients
 Morbid Objectivization or Devitalization: 14
patients
 Pain-like experiences: 6 patients
 Dysmorphic-like experiences: 9 patients
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One’s body lived hyper-esthesically
=> becomes an object for bio-medicine
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Bio-medicine is collusive to this