Binge Eating
In the late 1800s, the curtain was about to rise on modern conceptions of
anxiety. Victorians were beginning to get a glimpse of a new world, a world
characterized by radical transformations, such as the telegraph, new theories
of evolution and religion, telephones, light bulbs, elevators, and new forms
of transportation. Such transformations seemed to produce a special kind of
fear, a fear that we might call today general anxiety. Among burgeoning attention
to the study of “mental states,” such as William James’ seminal
work Principles of Psychology and Freud’s theory of the unconscious
mind, Victorian doctors increasingly noted a rise in a previously obscure disorder
called “hysteria.”Hysteria, from the Greek hysterikos (“of
the womb”) was mainly associated with women and was indeed thought
to be caused by a dysfunction of the uterus (Stacey 2002). The symptoms,
mostly exhibited by women, were physical, but they also seemed to be linked
to psychological factors and emotional distress. Increasingly, hysteria was
seen as a type of social illness that was directly related to the needs and
style of the era. In fact, soon after the turn of the century, cases of hysteria
declined as social transformations were established, including significant
changes in the status of women (Gordon 2000). Yet, in the second half of
the twentieth century, a different and more serious type of “anxiety” burst
into public view: eating disorders. Though several ancient texts seem to
describe many modern eating disorders, these disorders began to occur with
alarming frequency in the late 1960s.
Binge Eating
Binge Eating
Binge Eating
Binge Eating
Binge Eating
Binge Eating
Binge Eating
Binge Eating
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