The body as text: Anorexia nervosa. (The Mortification of the Flesh).

In eating disorders, the significance of body and food converge in the female experience. I'm familiar with the difficulties of the food-body-womanhood relationship through my own personal experience, as well as the experiences of female friends and acquaintances. A description of the paths that led me to the topic of eating disorders, specifically anorexia nervosa, explains the perspective from which I have observed this primarily female phenomenon.

I was not satisfied by the explanations I received during the years I studied psychology. From psychoanalysis to family therapy, these responses only explain the symptoms and fail to delve below the surface. In my opinion, eating disorders are the manifestation of a deeper search that Jung called individuation. In the Jungian and Transpersonal schools, I finally found a point of reference to help me understand my own existence and that of others which allows me to incorporate the need for transcendence and a divine dimension into my understanding of the vital processes of humanity.

It is from this position that I will attempt to find an alternative meaning for eating disorders--an understanding that will allow the conflict to become transformed into a path for growth, a path to become reacquainted with oneself, which in the end, is a path to become reacquainted with the divine within the human.

At the same time, the immense media coverage of this phenomenon has made me look beyond the purely individual and allowed me to observe anorexia's greater social repercussions. A phenomenon that arouses so much interest and is belittled by the explanations given about it (centered on the causal importance of the ideal body) clearly aggravates and attacks the foundation of the prevailing order

Anorexia directly questions the existence of certain regulated and normative ways of being and, in the process, creates a new option that does not obey the ideal. According to Bray and Colebrook (1998, p.58), in anorexia, the modes of consumption and the functions of the body itself could also be seen as forms of invention. The true "deviation" from the anorexic body could represent a certain "flaw" or "obstacle" of the Cartesian concept. This body would be precisely where the classic and regulatory "image of thought" as an ordered "theater" breaks down.

In the language of anorexia, there is a rejection of the patriarchy's definition of femininity. In turn, this dominant male order is forced to create and promote its own explanation in order to reduce the threat posed by the phenomenon of anorexia. The feminine experience and its conflicts are belittled in a world that prevents women from communicating on their own terms, thus eliminating the capacity for growth and transformation.

In its attempt to ameliorate the impact of anorexia, the system has validated extreme thinness as the canon of feminine beauty par excellance and has turned this ideal into a duty. In this context, anorexics are not transgressors, but rather become passive and obedient women. Those who are not docile "by nature" debilitate themselves with endless diets. "The many theories about women's food crises have stressed private psychology to the neglect of public policy, looking at women's shapes to see how they express a conflict about their society rather than looking at how their society makes use of a manufactured conflict with women's shapes. Many other theories have focused on women's reaction to the thin ideal as proactive, a preemptive strike" (Wolf, 1991, p.189).