Update as of February 15:
Because of all the additional stuff I wound up adding when editing it with new information since last summer, the text grew to cover about 250 pages of text in two columns on conventional 8 1/2 x 11" paper. In a 6" x 9" book size this translates into about 500 pages. Way too many for this kind of book. So I decided to cut a lot of text and publish it on a web site that peole who purchase the book can access. However, it is taking a lot of time to go over this much text and trying to decide what to keep and what to cut.
Update as of February 2 2008:
Around mid-summer last year, I slowly came to realized that some other factor that I was mildly aware of was emerging as a much more significant factor in my work on anorexia nervosa. As this developed as a result of research, the project evolved quite a bit. Then, as I developed a better understanding I began to rewrite several chapters. I started a new editing session in January and realized that the entire project needed to be rewritten because of my better insight into the problem. I seem to be getting somewhere with this now. As a result of the rewritting, the text has doubled in the ammount because of the increased complexity of the project. If I did not develop this insight back in mid-summer and published the book as it stood back then when I was working on the index, I would have had to withdraw the published works. At this time, I feel certain that I have cracked the anorexic code and my book will take the mystery out of understanding anorexia nerevosa.
I will be moving at the end of March, so that will probably further delay the publication. This in not a voluntary move, so I have no control over this delay.
I reworded some of this 24 October 2007:
I have also added a lot of information on the link below.
A Prelude to Alice’s Curious Adventures
Lewis Carroll's Alice had only one wonderland to contend with, which meant that she could return to the safety of the normal world if things got out of hand during her adventures into her mad fantasies. However, when Alice was recast to play the role of a girl suffering from anorexia nervosa in a new production she found herself being confronted on both sides with incomprehensible wonderlands. On the one hand, she conformed to the unnatural reality of our modern day technological wonderland that is, in some bizarre ways, in conflict with her inner nature. On the other hand, in consequences of this unknown inner conflict, Alice found herself being caught up in an even madder adventure in an anorectic version of Wonderland. In her new role, Alice is unaware that the bizarre nature of her anorectic Wonderland is the result of an unknown conflict that is brewing in the background of her unconscious mind and the Mad Hatter is none the wiser. Alice's therapist was chosen for the role of the Mad Hatter because that role demanded someone who could render her Wonderland in terms of a cultural myth.
Alice was always an imaginative child who could always manage to present a cheerful demeanour by smoothing over life's difficulties with her enchanting fantasies whenever things became disagreeable to her. However, Alice is unaware of a serious conflict that is going on in her psychic background that is partly a result of trying to evade life's difficulties. As a consequence of this conflict, she is faced with the prospects of not being able to find any true happiness in the technological wonderland of modernism. Faced with these difficulties, she finds herself slipping through the veil of time and space into her otherworldly reveries more and more often.
One evening when Alice was in a twilight frame of mind, she managed to slip through the silvery veil of her looking-glass into a dreamlike fantasy that seemed to her to be a curious parody upon the real world. While in this looking-glass state of mind, she suddenly had the feeling that everything in her real world was also being twisted around backwards in a confusing sort of way. Despite all the wonders of the modern technological wonderland, Alice unexpectedly began to develop an underlying sense of alienation, which made the real world seem as if it wasn't so real anymore.
Alice experienced some difficulties about fitting into her milieu and, in consequences, she developed a strange sense that her body was getting too big and awkward to easily slip through the veil of twilight consciousness into the secret garden of her reveries. As a result of her frustration, she decided to go on a diet. Then it happened; just when Alice thought that she was gaining some control over things with her fantasizing that she discovered that her situation can easily get out of control in a most bizarre fashion. As a result of the confusion, Alice doesn't understand how her life wound up in such a dreadful fantasy. Not knowing what else to do, she sought counsel about the bizarre turn of events in her fantasies but nobody in the official version of the real world seems to understand how or why her
life's fantasy suddenly turned into a bizarre paradox.
Like Alice's maddening adventure in Wonderland, all the theories that have been conjured up about anorexia nervosa over the past forty or so years present us with a very confusing picture of the phenomenon with no clear theory about the malady emerging out of the disarray. While some claim that self-destructive behaviour is the result of having repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, many others blame a dysfunctional family atmosphere for causing anorexia nervosa in their daughter. Because there is no evidence pointing to family dysfunction or repressed sexual abuse in most cases of anorexia nervosa, some say that anorexia nervosa is a learned behaviour as the result of having been brainwashed by society (Boskind-White and White, 2000, p.266), while others suggest that it is the result of a developmental deficit (Bruch). Levenkron (1982, p.4) simply put it down to a matter of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatry Association (DSM-IV, 1994) emphasizes a distorted body image as the main feature of anorexia nervosa, while Lee (2001, p.41) challenges this theory.
The theory that suggests that a body dysmorphic disorder was a determining symptom if not the cause of anorexia nervosa was proven to be wrong — a non sequitur among Asian anorexics (Lee, 2001). Nonetheless, Western theorists still hang onto this silly notion with the same sort of tenacity that an anorexic hangs onto her own convictions. A so-called body dysmorphic disorder is a culturally modified symptom that symbolize something else — an unconscious archetypal condition. This will be explained in a chapter on the modern mythology of body image where the word "mythology" is understood to mean that anything mythic is symbolic for something else — something unknown and more than likely related to an unconscious processes, not some egotistical concerns. By way of the backwards thinking process of looking-glass psychology it was thought that a distorted body image was the result of the influence of the fashion industry and this gave rise to anorexia nervosa in individuals who possessed a gene that predisposed them to developing anorexia nervosa and a body dysmorphic disorder.
For a long time I have been struggling with trying to explain why this and many other official explanations for self-destructive behaviour are psychologically unsound. However, every time I tried to examine their delusively sophisticated explanations, I wound up in a maddening conundrum as if my thinking was being turned around backwards in the reflection of some sort of queer looking-glass realm. So I sat down the other day and carefully analysed some of these facile explanations for self-destructive behaviour. Thinking about this conundrum was like receiving an invitation to some sort of bizarre pathological party.
Note as of 26 MARCH: I have a new web site for Alice's Adventures:
An Invitation to a Mad Tea Party at:
http://www.thequeenofwonderland.com/Malcolm
