Quand s’alimenter crée le trouble

Abstract

Though eating disorders are commonly addressed with psychiatric treatments, some alternative therapies have also emerged in the competitive context of their therapeutic management. Thus, Overeaters Anonymous—some support groups which gather without physician mediation—offer a curative model based on mutual assistance and community identity. Being open to all, they advocate an unusual healthcare pathway and a specific understanding of disease which, apparently unbiased, are both paradoxically fraught with religiousness. A historical approach will thereby help to reveal the filiation links between this fellowship and the Oxford Groups’ revivalist movement, Such an approach questions the official history of these groups and unravels the repetitive use of institutional biographies. Probing into official biographical data of all kinds helps to demonstrate how they tend to lastingly instil among the members some representation schemes and thereby legitimate their practices. These enlightening narratives actually convey the institution’s standards together with the guidelines for implicit but pervasive warning.

Keywords

• eating disorders
• Overeaters Anonymous
• institutional biographies
• charismatic figures
• alternative therapies
• historical sociology