Orthorexia: eating right in the context of healthism.

Orthorexia is a putative new eating disorder vying for a place in the DSM, roughly meaning "eating right". While a continuum can be drawn between anorexia and orthorexia, there are enough differences to make this disorder a distinct one. In this paper, I trace the origins of the term and its clinical career to date, employing Ian Hacking's concept of "ecological niche" to establish the place of orthorexia as a contemporary cyberpathy, a digitally transmitted disorder inwardly and narrowly focused on health through the consumption of "pure" foods. I critique both the notions of "health" and "purity" in this context, showing that orthorexia can only be understood in the context of healthism, an individual preoccupation with health in the context of neoliberalism. Using Jordan Younger's Breaking Vegan memoir (2015) and "Balanced Blonde" blog as a case study, I argue that orthorexia replicates via a digital proliferation of entrepreneurship of the self. Ultimately, this excessive preoccupation with health as a neoliberal cultural pathology bares life of meaning.

El olvido de la historia y la compulsión a repetirla: aportes para pensar la psicología de los pueblos / The forgetting of history and the compulsion to repeat: contributions to think the psychology of peoples

Este artículo teórico se propone hacer una reflexión del proverbio popular "los pueblos que olvidan su historia están condenados a repetirla" a la luz del concepto psicoanalítico de compulsión a la repetición. Para ello, se hace una revisión de dicho concepto en los textos de Freud y de Lacan, para explorar hasta qué punto él fue utilizado por estos autores para pensar fenómenos de masa en los que hay repetición de la historia. El método utilizado para dicha exploración es el paradigma indiciario, aplicable en la investigación psicoanalítica, en la medida en que prioriza lo irrepetible, lo singular, lo original. Los resultados de esta revisión teórica muestran cómo, si bien ni Freud ni Lacan utilizaron el concepto de compulsión a la repetición para aplicarlo a la psicología de los pueblos, él resulta útil para explicar dicha psicología de las masas en el fenómeno que aquí se aborda: la repetición de la historia cuando esta es olvidada, es decir, reprimida.

This theoretical article seeks to reflect upon the popular proverb that reads, "those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it," in light of the psychoanalytic concept of repetition compulsion. To that aim, the concept is revised in Freud ́s and Lacan ́s texts to explore to what extent they used it to explain mass phenomen in which there is repetition of history. The method used for this exploration is the evidential paradigm, applicable in psychoanalytic research as it prioritizes what is unrepeatable, singular, and original. The results of this search show that, even though neither Freud nor Lacan used it for that purpose, the concept of repetition compulsion is useful to explain mass psychology as regards the phenomenon herein studied: the repetition of history when it is forgotten, that is, repressed.

The creator of the term 'anancasm' was Hungarian: Guyla Donáth (1849-1944).

There is considerable confusion in the field of research on the history of psychiatry as to who created the term anancasm. This article seeks to clarify that the term was coined by the Hungarian psychiatrist Gyula Donáth, who was born in Baja, on the Danube, and worked mainly in Budapest. Donáth's publications reveal that his predominant sphere of interest and research was neurology and psychiatry. A number of his publications deal with epilepsy and obsessive-compulsive disorders. After a period of intensive research, during which he spent some time in Berlin at the clinic of neuroscientist Carl Westphal, Donáth proposed the term 'anancasm' in 1895 to describe compulsive mental processes.

On the nature of obsessions and compulsions.

In this chapter, we give an overview of current and historical conceptions of the nature of obsessions and compulsions. We discuss some open questions pertaining to the primacy of the affective, volitional or affective nature of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Furthermore, we add some phenomenological suggestions of our own. In particular, we point to the patients' need for absolute certainty and the lack of trust underlying this need. Building on insights from Wittgenstein, we argue that the kind of certainty the patients strive for is unattainable in principle via the acquisition of factual knowledge. Moreover, we suggest that the patients' attempts to attain certainty are counter-productive as their excessive conscious control in fact undermines the trust they need.

Famous people with Gilles de la Tourette syndrome?

Virtually no neurologist nor psychiatrist today can be unaware of the diagnosis of Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (GTS). Although the eponymous description by Dr. Georges Gilles de la Tourette was published in 1885, familiarity with this syndrome has been achieved only recently. In this article, the two most renown accounts of exceptional individuals retrospectively diagnosed with GTS are critically analyzed: British lexicographer Samuel Johnson and Austrian musician Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In both cases, clinical descriptions have been retrieved from written documents predating Gilles de la Tourette's original publication. The case for Samuel Johnson having GTS is strong, mainly based on Boswell's extensive biographical account. Johnson was reported to have a great range of tics and compulsions, including involuntary utterances, repetitive ejaculations, and echo-phenomena. On the other hand, there is circumstantial evidence that Mozart may have had hyperactivity, restlessness, sudden impulses, odd motor behaviors, echo/palilalia, love of nonsense words, and scatology, the latter being documented in autograph letters ("coprographia"). However, the evidence supporting the core features of GTS, i.e., motor and vocal tics, is rather inconsistent. Thus, GTS seems to be an implausible diagnosis in Mozart's medical history and completely unrelated to his undisputed musical genius.

[Impulsivity: historical and conceptual review]. / Impulsividad: revisión histórica y conceptual.

There is great confusion about the concept of impulsivity despite its important clinical use. Limits with others symptoms or behaviors, like aggressiveness, are imprecise, and we find no general agreement on the definition of impulsivity in the present literature. From the point of view of neurosciences, adequate identification and measurement of a symptom as impulsivity could increase the validity of syndromic diagnoses, improve the development of animal models and genetic studies, and improve the treatment of several psychiatric disorders. Based on this perspective, the overall goals of this review article are: a) to establish the historical evolution of term, concept and behavior that we presently identify as impulsivity, starting from the classical psychopathology of the will; b) to review several concepts of impulsivity described in the scientific literature, and c) to provide basic guidelines for an operative definition, just as some authors have proposed, to create research lines and understand various discoveries that basic sciences have contributed.