Illusions of agency in anorexia Professor Jennifer Radden, Honorary Visiting Professor, Department of Philosophy

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Organised by the Philosophy Department's Mind and Reason group as part of the Philosophy of Psychology and Psychiatry Lecture Series

Individuals diagnosed with Anorexia Nervosa often initially present as cognitively unremarkable. However, some of their beliefs and assertions challenge our understanding and seem to suggest disorder: observations such as “I am fat” when a person is measurably emaciated; expressions of value priorities like “self starvation is a sign of achievement,” and “eating a large plate of food would be worse than death”; and self-reports such as “I am in full control of my eating behavior.” Several attempts to identify and explain cognitive dysfunction in assertions like these have suggested that such misbeliefs and distorted values are delusional or delusion-like. The often-stated conviction from patients with anorexia that “I am in full control of my eating behavior” has recently been analyzed as illusory, or illusion-based (Evans 2020). Evans’ concept of anorexic illusory agency must reckon with the apparently superior self-control demonstrated in a collection of studies on delaying reward and self control in anorexia patients (Steinglass et al 2012; Decker, Figner & Steinglass 2015; Steinglass, Lempert & Choo 2017; Bartholdy et al. 2017). I explore implications of these findings for the concept of illusory agency and that of other forms of AN misbelief.

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