"effort after meaning"

In the 1930s, a psychologist named Bartlett coined the term "effort after meaning." It describes the phenomenon of people making sense of something retrospectively.



Connecting dots not meant to make a line.

We do this a lot with eating disorders. In an earlier era we found meaning in starvation as a sign of piety . More recently we looked to oral impregnation fears, powerlessness , and media objectification of women . Depending on your background you might see in eating disordered behavior a sign of a disconnect with G-d , the pathological modern family unit , of identity crisis , of the unrealistic pressures and expectations of modern life .

Presently, the fashionable effort after meaning concludes that EDs are the far end of a quest for thinness. This saddens me deeply. Yes, it seems at first to be obvious and irrefutable, but so did refrigerator mothers and choleric humors. If you observe an eating disorder up close you realize it has nothing to do with thinness. In fact, anorexics and bulimics are so disconnected from their true body composition they may be the only ones left in modern society who AREN'T really on a quest for thinness. They've either long since passed that goal or are blind to it.



It is up to us, and the rest of society, to resist using eating disorders as a metaphor for the ills of society. Our conclusions matter.