In contemporary society, anorexia nervosa is typically defined as an eating disorder characterized by significant weight loss and restrictive food intake, with its core mechanism often attributed to “body image disturbance.” According to this mainstream explanatory framework, patients persist in dieting because their perception of their own bodies is distorted—for instance, they may perceive an already emaciated body as “overweight.” Yet this understanding is primarily grounded in a third-person observational perspective, treating anorexia nervosa as a cognitive distortion or behavioral abnormality. It therefore overlooks how patients experience their own bodies within the specific lifeworlds they inhabit. It is precisely here that phenomenology offers an alternative perspective: Rather than asking, from the outside, “what do patients perceive incorrectly?” phenomenology turns instead to the question of how they experience themselves.

A fundamental insight of Husserlian phenomenology is that the human body cannot be understood simply as an object, but must be approached in two registers. One register is the “physical body” (Körper), which can be observed, measured, and evaluated; the other is the body as lived, the basis through which a person experiences the world—the “lived body” (Leib). In everyday life, these two dimensions usually exist in a dynamic unity: The body is ordinarily experienced as a living subject, even as it can also, to some extent, become an object of reflection. In the experience of anorexia nervosa, however, this unity is disrupted, and the body gradually shifts from “the body I am” to “an object viewed and judged by others.”

This shift does not merely signify a misjudgment of bodily size or shape, but reflects a deeper structural transformation of subjectivity. Patients no longer understand their bodies primarily through their own sensations and experience, but increasingly rely on the gaze of others to affirm their mode of existence. The image in the mirror ceases to be an extension of self-experience and instead becomes an object requiring constant correction and control. Many patients with anorexia nervosa, when recalling their experiences, describe a sense of alienation: The body they “see” no longer seems to belong to them, but appears instead as an external object awaiting evaluation. What this experience reveals is not a simple perceptual error, but a rupture in the subject’s relationship to itself.

A fuller account of this rupture requires Husserl’s analysis of intersubjectivity. From a phenomenological perspective, the self does not exist in isolation, but is continuously constituted through its relations with others. These relations are not always objects of explicit reflection; to a large extent, they are pre-reflective, meaning that the self already inhabits a shared world with others before that relation becomes conscious. In this sense, the self is, from the outset, a “self in relation to others.”

From a phenomenological perspective, this issue also involves an imbalance in the structure of difference between self and other. In his analysis of empathy, Husserl observes that understanding others depends on maintaining a tension between similarity and difference: Others are similar to the self, yet always retain an irreducible alterity. This relation of closeness-yet-separation is what makes intersubjectivity possible. In the experience of anorexia nervosa, however, this structure is often disrupted: Patients, to a certain extent, place themselves entirely within the perspective of others, attempting to define themselves through external evaluation and thereby eroding the necessary distance between self and other.

In this context, anorexia nervosa can be understood as an extreme manifestation of subjective imbalance—one evident not only at the level of bodily experience, but also within broader existential structures. Patients over-rely on a visualized, objectified understanding of the body while overlooking its role as the center of experience. They overemphasize the gaze of others, thereby diminishing the authority of their own experience. The result is a self-relation dominated by external evaluation.

This condition, however, is not immutable. One valuable insight from phenomenology is that subjectivity is not a fixed entity, but a structure continuously generated through experience and relations. This suggests that, as long as the structure of intersubjectivity can be readjusted, subjectivity itself can be reconstructed. The key lies in restoring a more balanced relationship: acknowledging the important role of others in self-formation without allowing them to entirely replace one’s own experiential position, and observing oneself from an external perspective without relinquishing first-person feelings and experience.

Reactivating pre-reflective interactive experience is therefore crucial to this reconstruction. Individuals must be able to re-enter forms of interaction not organized around judgment, where participation in the world as subjects can coexist with recognition of others as subjects in their own right. Such a relationship cannot be achieved merely through cognitive change; it entails a transformation in one’s mode of existence—from “an object under observation” to “a subject that experiences the world.”

Zhang Junguo is an associate professor from the College of Philosophy at Nankai University.