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  • Is Anorexia Nervosa a Passion?
  • Hannah Bowden (bio)
Keywords

Anorexia nervosa, the passions, phenomenology

In their paper “Anorexia Nervosa as a Passion” (2013), Louis C. Charland, Tony Hope, Anne Stewart, and Jacinta Tan present an interesting case for conceptualizing anorexia nervosa as a form of passion—a long-term affective state. They persuasively argue the need to focus on the affective features of anorexia nervosa, rather than using cognitive states such as beliefs to fully describe the disorder. If we wish to understand the experience of anorexia nervosa, enabling the development of effective treatments, it is important that we take seriously the descriptions offered by those with the disorder. The authors use first-person accounts, collected through interviews, to explore and describe the experience of anorexia nervosa. Quotations from these interviews highlight the frequency with which the language used to describe anorexia nervosa is affective in nature—descriptions of the experience are told through a framework of ‘love,’ ‘fear,’ and so on. As one person tellingly puts it, “I guess in a way it’s almost an EMOTION’ (Charland et al. 2013, 357). Their emphasis is consistent with what we find in first person published narratives. For example, Marya Hornbacher describes in her memoir of anorexia nervosa an “obsessive love of food” (1999, 150). Descriptions such as these seem to highlight affective features of anorexia nervosa. The authors are right, I think, to take seriously the affective statements made by those with anorexia nervosa, and there is clearly a great deal of understanding to be gained from building up accurate accounts of the affective features of the disorder. However, although I accept the value of the overarching project, in this commentary I wish to raise two critical points. First, I question whether it is necessary to reinstate the concept of the passions, or whether there are preexisting concepts that might be capable of doing the descriptive work needed. Second, I point to two central features of anorexia nervosa that the concept of the passions does not seem to address—alterations in bodily experience and alterations in identity.

A passion, we are told, is a long-term affective state, that “plays a significant role in motivating, determining, and organizing a person’s long-term behavior” (Charland et al. 2013, 354). Anorexia nervosa seems to occupy this orientating role in the anorectic’s life, with those with the disorder describing how it comes to frame all of their experiences, both highlighting relevant features of the world and motivating certain courses of action. The authors cite numerous first-person descriptions that demonstrate how anorexia nervosa comes to dominate the person’s experiences. We also find similar reports in first-person published narratives. For example, in her memoir of anorexia nervosa, Grace Bowman writes, “It is as if her brain is programmed by anorexia to search out the relevant information, to filter it through [End Page 367] at super speed” (Bowman 2006, 221). Anorexia nervosa dominates the person’s thought processes and provides a framework for their experiences of the world more generally.

However, it is worth asking whether there are concepts already in use that might be able to do the descriptive work needed. We should not reinstate a concept if it does not do any descriptive or explanatory work beyond that already done by current concepts. When seeking to describe experiences of psychiatric illness, there has been remarkable success in the application of phenomenology. For example, informative discussions have developed from phenomenological accounts of schizophrenia and, more recently, depression.1 Given the success in this area, I would like to consider whether this organizing and motivating affective state can be captured using concepts from the phenomenological tradition.

One candidate might be Heideggerian Mood. Heidegger suggests that, far from being simply tacked on to experience, potentially obscuring or distorting our perception of the world, being in a mood is in fact fundamental to our everyday experience of the world as meaningful (e.g., 1962). The mood that we are in highlights to us aspects of the world as significant, revealing frameworks of meaning and possible courses of action that give structure to our everyday experiences. As Heidegger puts it, a mood is “disclosive...

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