 Like other self-harming practices, self starvation has not received medical diagnosis in many historical and cross-cultural contexts, where explanations instead appeal to the subject’s religious, ideological, or political motivations. So the motivation of the anorexic individual deserves attention, especially her beliefs, attitudes and feelings (Giordano 2005; Svenaeus 2013; Morris 2013). Efforts to isolate underlying perceptual dysfunction once supposed to explain the anorexic’s attitudes have been unsuccessful (Morris 2013). A more complex hypothesis, involving interaction between defective “body schemas” (non-linguistic, preconscious, bodily representations) that are distorted by, and also generate, the anorexic’s attitudes, await the attention of neuroscience. (See Morris 2013; Gadsby 2017.)