If appetite is stimulated by eating, the lack of appetite,anorexia, is stimulated by not eating. It is clear, then, that the natural need to eat, to feed oneself, can become mimetically overloaded and transformed first into a desire, then into a passionate desire, either to deprive oneself of food or to gorge oneself. The idea that both anorexia and bulimia are diseases of desire is what interests René Girard. For Girard, desire is mimetic, and therefore competitive: every desire springs from rivalry, every rivalry from desire.

Desire has no interest in health. Passion, when it seizes control of the...

Thin is in, stout is out.¹ It was not always so. In 1911, French physician Francis Heckel wrote that his patients sometimes resisted losing weight, preferring to “stay obese for reasons of fashionable appearance.” The need to have an “impressivedécolleté” made every woman feel “duty-bound” to fatten the upper part of her body, from the neck to the breasts, which could not be done without gaining weight elsewhere. If health reasons obliged a woman to reduce her abdomen, she would have to accept losing weight higher up. This was a “true sacrifice,” emphasized Heckel, for it meant renouncing “what...

Among younger women, eating disorders are reaching epidemic proportions. The most widespread and spectacular at this moment is the most recently identified, the so-called bulimia nervosa, characterized by binge eating followed by “purging,” sometimes through laxatives or diuretics, more often through self-induced vomiting. Some researchers claim that in American colleges at least one third of the female student population is involved to some degree. (Since nine out of ten sufferers are women I will use feminine pronouns in this paper, but some undergraduates at Stanford tell me that the epidemic is spreading to male students.)

G.M.F. Russell, the first researcher...

Mark Anspach: René Girard, could you begin by telling us something about the origin of the text published here? What led you to reflect upon a subject like anorexia?

René Girard: My interest in the subject goes all the way back to my childhood. There were cases of anorexia—not very severe but real enough—in my own family, in particular a young cousin whom I talk about in the text. Consequently, when I read Claude Vigée’s bookLes artistes de la faim(1960), it brought back memories. Later, when I decided to write on the subject myself, I took...