Origen De Anorexia

The origins of anorexia nervosa

Plot
The first clinical descriptions of the disorder appeared in England and France almost simultaneously in 1873. They were written by two well-known physicians: Sir William Withey Gull and Charles Lasegue. Lasegue, more than any other nineteenth century doctor, captured the rhythm of repeated offerings and refusals that signaled the breakdown of reciprocitybetween parents and their anorexic daughter. . By returning to its origins, we can see anorexia nervosa for what it is; a dysfunction in the bourgeois family system.
Family meals assumed enormous importance in the bourgeois milieu, in the United States as well as in England and France. Middle class parents prided themselves on providing ample food for their children. The abundance of food and thecare in its preparation became expressions of social status. The ambience of the meal symbolized the values of the family. Among the middle class it seems that eating correctly was emerging as a new morality, one that set its members apart from the working class. At the same time, food was used to express love in the nineteenth century bourgeois household. Offering attractive and abundant mealswas the particular responsibility and pleasure of middle class wives and mothers. In America the feeding of middle class children, from infancy on, had become a maternal concern no longer deemed appropriate to delegate to wet nurses, domestics, or governesses. Family meals were expected to be a time of instructive and engaging conversation. In this context refusing to eat was an unabashedlyantisocial act. Anorexic behavior was antithetical to the ideal of bourgeois eating.
Lasegues 1873 description of anorexia nervosa, along with other nineteenth century medical reports, suggests that pressure to marry may have precipitated the illness. As a result, the issue of marriage did not generally occur until the girls early twenties and the context of marital expectations, a daughter refusal toeat was a provocative rejection of both the family’s social aspirations and their goodwill toward her.
Beyond the specific anxieties generated by marital pressure, the Victorian family milieu in America and in Western Europe harbored a mélange of other tensions and problems that provided the emotional preconditions for the emergence of anorexia nervosa. As love replaced authority as the cement offamily relations, it began to generate its own set of emotional disorders. For example, became an acute problem in Victorian family life. Where love between parents and children were the prevailing ethic, there was always the risk of excess. Middle class girls, for example, almost always had their own rooms or shared them with sisters, but they had greater difficulty establishing autonomous psychicspace. The well known penchant of adolescent girls for novel reading was an expression of their need for imaginative freedom.
When an adolescent daughter became sullen and chronically refused to eat, her parents felt threatened and confused. The daughter was perceived as willfully manipulating her appetite the way a younger child might. Because parents did not want to encourage this behavior theoften refused at first to indulge the favorite tastes or caprices of their daughter. From the parents perspective a return to eating was a confirmation of filial love.
Significance of food refusal as an emotional tactic within the family depended on foods being plentiful, pleasing and connected to love, where food was eaten simply to assuage hunger, where it had only minimal aesthetic andsymbolic message. In contrast, the anorexic girl was surrounded by a provident, if not indulgent, family that was bound to be distressed by her rejection of its largess. Anorexia nervosa was an intense form of discourse that honored the emotional guidelines that governed the middle class Victorian Family.In her own way, the anorexic was respectful of what historian Peter Gay called the great bourgeois...