Health professionals have few resources to help them work with men who suffer from eating
disorders (ie, anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa) apart from the literature that focuses on
females who suffer with eating disorders. This paper presents an analysis of in-depth
interviews with eight men with eating disorders. These men provided rich descriptive
information to document their plight with body image concerns and eating disorders. Further,
it draws on their experiences of suffering with a disorder linked primarily to women. The …

That the earliest human experience is somatic is a widely held view in the literature on body
image, psychosexual, and psychosocial development (Chodorow, 1978; Erikson, 1950;
Freud, 1933; Greenacre, 1958; Kestenberg, 1975; Piaget, 1954; Schilder, 1950). These
theorists generally agree that body image, a cognitive construct, forms as the infant becomes
capable of distinguishing and integrating sensations. The body image is particularly
complex because it appears to include surface, depth, and postural pictures of the body as …