Beyond Anorexia: Narrative, Spirituality and Recovery

by Catherine Garrett

Overview

Beyond Anorexia is a sociological exploration of how people recover from what medicine labels as "eating disorders," and the first book to focus exclusively on recovery. Beginning with her own personal story, and drawing on conversations with over thirty other former sufferers, Catherine Garrett demonstrates the fundamental importance of narrative to social theory and to healing. Her central claim is that recovery is a "spiritual" experience (not necessarily a religious one), reconnecting the self with body, nature and society. As such it is the key to fully understanding anorexia.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521620154
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/13/1998
Pages:	260
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

Table of Contents

Part I. Personal Sociology: 1. Descent and return; 2. Researching recovery; 3. Autobiography, narrative and healing; Part II. Anorexia and Recovery: 4. Reinterpreting 'anorexia'; 5. Reinterpreting 'recovery'; 6. Recovery stories; Part III. Spirituality: 7. Society and spirit; 8. Rituals of self-transformation; 9. Spiritual stories; Part IV. The Body: 10. Recreating the body; 11. The sexual body; 12. The knowing body; Epilogue; Appendices.

Editorial Reviews

"Catherine Garrett has made a bold new departure in the approach to anorexia, strikingly original in its interweaving of psychological insight, narrative skill and theoretical depth. Beyond Anorexia is genuinely inspiring, because by displacing the center of the problem from the clinical to the spiritual, and from illness to recovery, it gives hope as well as instruction." Joel Kovel, Alger Hiss Professor of Social Science, Bard College, New York

"In this unconventional look at eating disorders, Garrett addresses the existential and spiritual questions surrounding anorexia nervosa." Choice

From the Publisher