Anorexia nervosa and eating disorders from a phenomenological perspective: A French version of the IDentity and EAting disorders (IDEA) questionnaire

Objective. - This research set out to test the French version of the IDentity and EAting disorders questionnaire (IDEA) (Stanghellini et al., 2012). From a phenomenological perspective, anorexic patients seem to experience difficulties regarding the subjective feeling of their own body (embodiment) and their personal identity, which leads to an impairment of inter-subjectivity in social interactions. Following these findings, this study investigated the body-for-others concept (Sartre, 1943) in a sample of anorexic female patients. These patients tended to define themselves mostly through the eyes of others instead of from their own perspective: their Leib (i.e. the real body) was hypothesized to be more vulnerable than their Korper (i.e. the body object). Hypothesis. - The main hypothesis was that anorexic patients would define themselves mostly through the eyes of others and would tend to experience fewer bodily sensations than control participants. Significantly higher scores for these dimensions in the clinical group compared to the control group were expected. Method. - This study included 67 anorexic female patients diagnosed on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV criteria, and 246 female controls. All the participants were French speakers from Belgium, France and Switzerland. Participants were asked to complete two self-report questionnaires: The Eating Disorder Inventory 2 (EDI-2) (French version) evaluating eating disorders and the IDEA (French version translated and adapted by the authors) to explore the body-for-others concept. Mann-Whitney non-parametric tests were used to compare the results for the clinical and the control groups. Conclusion. - The outcomes confirmed our hypothesis: the anorexic female patients had significantly higher scores compared to the control group on both of the questionnaires: the EDI-2 and the IDEA. The anorexic patients seemed to have difficulties in the way they experienced their own body, their personal identity and their perceptions of the gaze of others. The IDEA is a tool that has been elaborated for the assessment of these issues. It enriches knowledge relating to the body-self relationship and the first-person perspective, which is essential for a phenomenological approach. However, it still requires further research to be validated and used in clinical practice. (C) 2019 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.