Body experience, identity and the other’s gaze in persons with feeding and eating disorders

The purpose of this paper is to define and describe the main phenomenological dimensions of the life-world of persons prone to Feeding and Eating Disorders (FEDs), within the framework of a model that considers abnormal eating behaviour an epiphenomenon of a more profound disorder of lived corporeality and identity. The core idea is that persons with FEDs experience their own body first and foremost as an object being looked at by another, rather than coenaesthetically or from a firstperson perspective. Alienation from one’s own body and the need to feel oneself only through the gaze of the others can be illuminated by looking at it in the light of the Sartrean concept of feeling a lived-body-for-others.