Psychiatry as social ordering: anorexia nervosa, a paradigm.

From a psychiatric perspective, anorexia nervosa (hereafter referred to as 'anorexia') is an enigmatic illness. This paper attempts to explain why this is so, describing anorexia as a western cultural phenomenon whose psychiatric explanations and treatments actually participate in the sociocultural processes that inform this syndrome. Anorexia reveals a form of contemporary control over the female body, and psychiatry, as a western discipline, institutionalizes a mind-over-body (objective) ideology that is part of this project. Various psychiatric theories of anorectic etiology and their corresponding methods of treatment are analyzed in this light, and a general framework for understanding the discipline of psychiatry as a mode of social control is offered.