"Knowing one's self" anorexic: implications for therapeutic practice

OBJECTIVE: Recent postmodernist studies of anorexia nervosa (AN) challenge current clinical understandings and therapies by illuminating not what AN is but how what it is known to be by clinicians helps construct the disorder and therapy for it. This study points to the equal if not greater importance of how patients know AN. METHODS: Using a deconstructive approach, the discourses of a group of women diagnosed with severe AN were analyzed to reveal radically different versions of "knowing one's self" anorexic. RESULTS: These versions of "self" have strategically different implications for, and meanings of, any therapeutic endeavour. DISCUSSION: Postmodernist approaches point to the need for social reconstruction of lay and community understandings of AN. They also have implications at the level of individual therapy, and could be deployed with patients to establish individual but authentic bases for therapy.