Eating Disorders: An Outline of Postmodern Psychodynamics

The dazzling characteristics of postmodernity in the form of social flexibility, economization and virtualization can be understood as an expression of a cultural configuration that is by no means natural and irreversible, but is particularly media-related. Bulimia seems, more than Anorexia, a prime example of this. With regard to the historicity of symptoms in their various forms and disorders over time, consideration is given to how anorexic and bulimic symptoms position themselves in it. If the development toward postmodernity is to be understood as the pathology of modernity, in the course of the social pervasion of visual media there is a socio-cultural turnabout to the fragile self, in which the theoretical polarity of conflict and structure can no longer be displayed.