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Is anorexia wired into our moral foundations?
Modern day eating disorders might share the same roots as medieval asceticism
The conventional understanding of eating disorders is as a by-product of the modern world’s unrealistic beauty standards, as promoted by photoshopped magazine shots and rail-thin catwalk models. But what if the true cause is wired into us at the level of our very moral foundations? This is the premise of Unholy Anorexia, a piece that explores parallels between mortification of the flesh in medieval saints, and the suffering of modern-day anorexics.
The author, neuropsychologist and writer Paul Broks, relates how a chance encounter with an anorexic woman attending one of his lectures prompted him to re-evaluate anorexia. Where formerly he’d seen anorexics as merely ‘precious young women just refusing to eat’, now anorexia seemed to encapsulate ‘questions that had always interested me, questions that, inevitably, loop back to Descartes: the relation of mind and body; selfhood; mortality; divinity.’
Broks recounts how this line of enquiry developed via reading a book on medieval mystics whose asceticism demonstrated clear parallels with anorexia. For example Catherine of Siena, a fourteenth-century mystic, ‘was dead of self-starvation at 33’. While such ‘holy anorexics’ as Catherine of Siena framed their self-mortification in terms of religious faith rather than ideal body image, Broks suggests that the disgust expressed by both medieval and modern anorexics for their bodies offers some clues as to how we could rethink the treatment of anorexia today:
The author sketches a brief history of the psychology of disgust, from its most primal function as guardian of the body against noxious or poisonous substances to moralisation through metaphors of cleanliness and sanctity. From there he shows how disgust can to turn against the very bodies it evolved to protect, in a doomed effort to deny the inevitability of death:
The author traces the tension between divine and the disgusting in lives of history’s holy anorexics: Catherine of Siena is reported to have cured herself of disgust at one woman’s sickness by drinking the pus from her sores. Disgust, he suggests, is under-researched as a factor in modern anorexia nervosa but indicative results suggest heightened disgust-sensitivity in sufferers.
Having survived a bout of anorexia as a young adult, this rings true to my experience: though thankfully those days are long behind me, I can still recall the overwhelming feeling of disgust triggered by the prospect of even the most frugal meal.
Broks suggests that for some individuals, the yearning for a bodiless state of sanctity is inseparable from an intense experience of our animal nature — both shaped by acute sensitivity to disgust. Self-starvation, then, emerges as a means of resolving an impossible tension: the competing pull of mind and body via disgust. In a culture that seems to offer us all limitless scope for self-transcendence via the disembodied online world, maybe we could all benefit from further exploration of this most primal, animalistic and mystical emotion.
Fascinating..and rings true.
I wonder why this essay is being regurgitated here, given its original production begged more questions, than its rather simplistic cause and effect answers-and reductionist thinking applied to medieval spirituality.The original text on which the hypothesis is based by R Bell is still disputed. Julia Kristeva offers one view of disgust, in Powers of Horror. It is all very well citing disgust as playing a part in anorexia-one that should not be generalised, it is something else when it is cited as a ’cause’, just as there were many reasons behind the self starvation of male and female mystics,including the desire, which was predominant for many of them, of wishing to share in the pains and agony of the crucifixion.
The emotions and feelings associated with the maternal, or mother’s body,( its parts, openings- bleeding,etc)can have a close relation to disgust,and is also a very dominant presence in contemporary accounts of anorexia,and may have had a part to play in the accounts of medieval mystics.
Very sorry to hear that Mary suffered briefly from anorexia when younger. Did she suffer from it after she had taken up distance running, by any chance? I know that female distance runners have a higher incidence of anorexia than females in general, which is not the same thing as saying taking up distance running makes them prone to anorexia. I would be interested in knowing her own thoughts on the subject.
Though not any sort of expert my understanding is that it is more to do with control than disgust. If you feel not in control of events or situations in your life you can take control of what you eat.
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