Body Image and Eating Disorders

'In this ambitious volume, the authors situate eating and body image disorders as pathologies reflecting the crisis of humanity in an increasingly mechanized world. Sweeping through existential and deconstructionist philosophy, anthropology and cultural studies, psychoanalysis and neuroscience, this book offers a unique integration, to be savored across disciplines and time.' Sarah Schoen, The William Alanson White Institute, USA The hypermodernity of the liquid society roots its distorted dynamics only in the external experience of existence. The body therefore plays a central role in social communication: the body as exteriority, the body as mediator of life and psychic suffering, the body as the only element on which to build society ... seduction itself no longer passes through the refined play of the intellect and sentiment but only through the extreme, deified exteriority at the same time dereified by modern communication technologies, timeless because it is linked to the terror of passing time. The authors analyze with mastery and from a mixed philosophical and psychological perspective (but isn't it true that psychology has one of its roots in philosophy?) the development from the traditional society to a liquid and hypermodern one of the conceptualization and the role of the body in psychological development (covering the individual, social, and political facets). In this they use not only metaphors and literature data, but constant references to everyday reality, re-read and framed in an epistemology that is not only useful but necessary to provide adequate tools to interpret the current course of humanity. Federico Durbano, State University, Milan, Italy Floriana Irtelli and Fabio Gabrielli in Contemporary Perspectives on Body Image, Eating Disorders and Body Image Disorders develop theoretical and clinical ideas by revisiting classical references, in the light of new scientific and sociological perspectives. They start from an analysis of the social and cultural context in which the man of the 21st century lives and focus on a cogent aspect of contemporary fragility eating disorders and body image disorders. The authors face the suffering of today's man with particular disenchantment and lucidity, aware that suffering is an opportunity to promote growth processes. Maria Pia Roggero, SIPRe, Società Italiana di Psicoanalisi della relazione, Italy