ED(s), Embodiment, and Identity

Introduction

Outlook

Disorder of eating behaviour

Disorder of embodiment

Disorder of identity

Hypothesis

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.

Clinical impressions (supporting the hypothesis)

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

Phenomenological framework

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-body-for-others.

Three bodies

Living/Lived body (Leib)Object body (Körper)Lived body for others

Living/lived body (Leib)

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.

Chaire (Merleau-Ponty)

LEIB (in statu detrahendi)

LIVING BODY, rather than

Dead body Devitalized body Deanimated body An-emotional body An-intentional body Mechanical body

LIVED BODY, rather than

Perceived body Objectualized body Externalized body Explicit Body Pornographic body

Object-body (Körper)

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.

The body that can be manipulated.

Lived Object

The lived-body turns into a physical, objective body whenever we become aware of it in a disturbing way.

Implicit=> Explicit

Whenever our movement is somehow impeded or disrupted, then the lived-body is thrown back on itself, materialized or ’corporealized’.

It becomes an object for me.

Lived body for others 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.

Sartre: the ‘lived-body-for-others’.

“With the appearance of the Other’s look I experience the revelation of my being-as-object”.

The upshot of this is a feeling of

“having my being outside (…) [is the feeling] of being an object”.

Thus, one’s identity becomes reified by the gaze of the other, and reduced to the external appearance of one’s own body.

Shame

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).

Shame

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.

Body as Otherness

One’s body as the most intimate form of Otherness

Involuntary aspects in human existence: body,world, others, history

The body as facticity and contingency

Dialectics between oneself and one’s own body

Body as facticity

‘Facticity’, including oneself as ‘this’ body, its form, height, weight, colour, as well as one’s past and what is actually happening.

Having been a living bodily being before, I now realize that I have a material (impeding, clumsy, vulnerable, finite, etc.) body.

Body as a task

The material body is transcendental to me.

It is an attribute that I can/must modify.

=> Techno-body

The culture of late modernity promises that one can modify one’s own material body at one’s own will.

Phenomenology of ED(s)

Part Two

Experimental phenomenologyFactor 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).

Factor 1: “Feeling oneself only through the gaze of the other and defining oneself only through the evaluation of the other” (GEO)

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

Factor 2: “Feeling oneself only through objective measures” (OM)

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

Factor 3: “Feeling extraneous from one’s own body” (EB)

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

Factor 4: “Feeling oneself through starvation” (S).

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

A tentative model

Feeling extraneous from oneself

Feeling oneself through the gaze of the other

Feeling oneself through objective measures

Feeling oneself through starvation

ED(s): Esthetic body rather than cenesthetic

No cenesthetic (pathic) basis for identity

Hyper-identification with one’s own body

One’s own body as:An object looked at by the othersAn object to be manipulated

The Buildung of one’s body is a way to build one’s identity

The dialectics of the body

Part Three

The dialectics of the body

I am this body, but also I am not just this body

I am this body, but also I have that body

The paradoxical body in melancholia

Strcture of hyper-identification (with one’s own body)

Object-body-that-I-amParadoxical Lived Körper

This-nessLiving dead

ABE(s) in Schizophrenia

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

Hypochondria: hyper-esthesic body

One’s body lived hyper-esthesically => becomes an object for bio-medicine

Bio-medicine is collusive to this