Fighting Horses

So…I, like many, was anorexic in high school. I weighed 89lbs in 10th grade, went to the hospital for weekly hydrations, the whole nine yards. And I think that anorexia (and other eating disorders I’m sure, I’m just speaking from personal experience) is a really fantastic example of the Cartesian split. Anorexia is a mental disease that dramatically affects the body. It often arises from having low self esteem and issues with weight, but the disease itself becomes something entirely different. It is a totally obsessive state in which weight is the only thing that matters. An interesting example of the Cartesian split came up in class; the person being considered the charioteer of the self and having to govern two horses, one being the mind, the good horse, and one being the body, the bad horse. An anorexic’s horses are both bad. They want the other’s blood, and will stop at nothing before destroying the other horse. The mind is never satisfied with the body. It knows it’s thin and needs to be thinner. The body is never satisfied with the mind. It is in constant pain because of the effects of malnutrition and turns the personality into a conniving, self centered, obsessive entity. But the two are very much separated. For anorexics, THEY are the mind, and the body is the enemy. It is in no way apart of them, but it is a constant source of obsession.

All this is to say that the mind has a lot of control over the body, and the body has as much over the mind. I was certainly a Cartesian 10th grader, but now I’m not so sure. The effects of malnutrition on the body cause an altered state of reality for the mind. The idea of one being the good horse and one being the bad horse is an illusion. And now I see the error of my failed therapists’ ways! They were Cartesians! They treated my body because the effects were on my body. They told me how to take care of my body or else bad things were to happen to my body. But the problem is the whole, which includes the mind. The mind has stopped interpreting correctly. It is fighting the body, mislabeling it as the enemy, because it doesn’t understand that they are one and the same. It knows the body is thin, but “too thin” doesn’t make sense to it, just “not thin enough.” The word “sickly” acquires the same connotations as “beautiful.” Understanding this is crucial to understanding the disease.