Tag: louise gluck notes

Duker and Slade, Anorexia and Bulimia: How to Help, 108-10

There are three underlying characteristics that are particularly marked in any sufferer. These are an intense morality, an extreme sensitivity, particularly to the needs and feelings of others, and a profound sense of worthlessness [ … ] there is a large measure of agreement among authorities on anorexia nervosa that these are key characteristics [ … ] It is characteristic of those who become entrapped in the illness that they are completely rule-bound [ … ] They apply their moral rules to food, to eating, to exercising as to everything else in their life [ … ] sufferers typically adhere very strongly to a cluster of values that centre on hard work, self control, personal responsibility, high standards of achievement, deferred gratification, not receiving rewards that have not been earned, not receiving where this is not deserved [ … ] these values and aspirations can be applied to food and body regulation as effectively as they can be applied to work, educational achievements, career success, personal relationships and of course sports, where encouragement for these values to be extended to body regulation is explicit [ … ] Anorexics, bulimics, all those striving to get their body ‘into shape’ [ … ] are people who place very high value on control [ … ] it is the continuity between the sufferers’ moral attitude and that of their social group or culture that again explains why the condition can be lethal.

from Simona Giordano’s Understanding Eating Disorders

…the pursuit of lightness is thus a pursuit of inviolability. Silently, with no apparent intervention on others or on the external environment, people with eating disorders expand that environment, thus expanding the space between themselves and other people. In the isolation of their thinness and lightness, people with eating disorders achieve an exceptional place, one that is out of reach. This achievement, as we shall see in the next chapter, has important links with morality. Isolation in fact allows detachment from the ‘physical’ world, and the achievement of a ‘transcendent’ dimension. Isolation, thus, not only responds to an overwhelming fear of intrusions, but also contributes towards satisfying an ethical ambition to spirituality. Moreover, because of the strenuous sacrifice involved, the defence of the personal sphere is also proof of will power, and this, as we shall see, is one of the keys for understanding the ethical connotations of eating disorders.

on anorexia

It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of deadly contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength. A wish to prove that you need nothing, that you have no human hungers, which turns on itself and becomes a searing need for the hunger itself. It is an attempt to find an identity but ultimately strips you of any sense of yourself, save the sorry identity of “sick.” It is a protest against cultural stereotypes of women that in the end makes you seem the weakest, the most needy and neurotic of all women. It is the thing you believe is keeping you safe, alive, contained—and in the end, of course, you find it’s doing quite the opposite.

—marya hornbacher, from wasted

From “The Idea of Courage,” by Louise Gluck in Proofs & Theories, 25.

The deft skirting of despair is a life lived on the surface, intimidated by depth, a life that refuses to be used by time, which it tries instead to dominate or evade. … In its horror of passivity, it forgets that passivity over time is, by definition, active. There exists, in other words, a form of action felt as helplessness, a form of will that exhibits, on the surface, none of the familiar dynamic properties of will. Fortitude is will.