From Body Image to Emotional Bodily Experience in Eating Disorders

Abstract

This paper is a critical analysis and overview of body image conceptualization and its scope and limits within the field of eating disorders (eds) up to the present day. In addition, a concept ofemotional bodily experienceis advanced in an attempt to shift towards a more comprehensive and multidimensional perspective for thelived bodyof these patients. It mainly considers contributions from phenomenology, embodiment theories and a review of the empirical findings that shed light on the emotional bodily experience in eating disorders. It proposes an ‘embodied defense’ that leads patients to experiencing their own bodies as objects. This proposal highlights the need for new psychotherapeutic tools in the treatment ofeds that take into account the bodily resonance of emotions and their use for improving adaptive responses to the environment: it calls for helping patients to recover the subjective experience of their bodies.

Living with obesity — existential experiences

“…Health services focusing, for example, on lifestyle-changing programs might increase attempts to control the obese body, but this can also lead to an increased objectification of the body (Grønning et al, 2013). Gaete and Fuchs (2016) confirmed that it appears to be difficult for people struggling with weight problems to stay in a subject position, as their lived body is in a vulnerable and unbearable state. Therefore, it must be an important therapeutic goal to look behind the symptoms if possible, to make a shift of rigid objectification of one's own body towards a subject position (Gaete & Fuchs, 2016).…”

“…Further, he states that becoming oneself always begins through knowing and accepting oneself in the present (Batchelor, 2006;Kierkegaard, 1849). Gaete and Fuchs (2016) claimed that the public health service seems to enhance such objectification of the person's body. Health services focusing, for example, on lifestyle-changing programs might increase attempts to control the obese body, but this can also lead to an increased objectification of the body (Grønning et al, 2013).…”

Anorexia Nervosa and First-Person Perspective: Altruism, Family System, and Body Experience

“…Many works of this tradition have come to link anorexic psychopathology with complex alterity and "intercorporeity" processes [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. According to a traditional proposition of phenomenology, we can distinguish two types of body experience.…”

“…This first contribution is useful to our understanding of anorexic body experience because it demonstrates that it is possible to evoke body existence beyond the simple materiality of this body, or beyond its simple representation [21,28], and consequently beyond its state of slimness. An anorexic-lived body cannot be reduced to the marks of the disease.…”

“…His/her body is moved by intentionality, in other words by the tendency of the consciousness to go beyond itself and to burst into the world. However, as Bowden [20] and Gaete and Fuchs [28] underline it, the expression of the anorexic-lived body is obviously troubled. The anorexic person suffers from disordered bodily experience in the sense of being cut off from a range of sensations.…”