For an anthropology of eating disorders. A pornographic vision of the self

Abstract

In reading the considerations of the leading contemporary sociologists, attentive observers of the metamorphosis of identity in the post-modern age, a game came to my mind: "what if I mixed up quotes from these scholars' papers with extracts from patients' clinical reports, especially people suffering from so-called "eating disorders"? The objective of this game is to show how difficult it is to pick out the clinical fragments from the sociologists' descriptions of the "never ending task of assembling our Self". The game is to try to separate psychopathology from the Late Modern physiology of identity. The great psychopathologists from the last century offered us two major meaning organizers of identity and its disorders: the Freudian and the Jaspersian. Freud's notion of the "discontents with civilization" served to explain that widespread sense of malaise that characterizes the modern condition. As civilization has been built on our restraining our drives, civilized man ended up "trading in a part of his chances for happiness for a bit of security". Security is guaranteed by our submitting to norms of civilized living together. Neurosis, that feeling that permeates modern human beings who neither belong to themselves nor to others, is the agonizing result. The Jaspersian concept of the Ego consciousness is mainly based on the Kantian Self, the identity pole of subjectivity, standing above the stream of changing experience. It is a necessary condition for coherent experience. Also the Jaspersian Self presupposes coherence, since its main features include identity through time, a sense of unity and one of demarcation from the external world, and a feeling of being actively involved in one's own experiences and performances. In late modernity, identity is a task. Post-modern people have the task and necessity to be perpetually constructing themselves. Being, Self, are organized in a reflexive way. Individuals are forced to choose their own life style among a multitude of alternatives. Are the Freudian and the Kantian/Jaspersian models of the Self now still proving to be suitable for an adequate psychopathological analysis?