ABSTRACT
This chapter presents author's phenomenological analysis of illness suffering by means of exploring different ways in which the body and life of a person may show up as alien and uncanny to her. The main example will be the case of anorexia nervosa. Drew Leder, in the important work, The Absent Body, draws our attention in the same way to how the 'own-body' (lived body) might appear as something that hurts and resists the will of its owner. Jean-Paul Sartre's analysis makes lucid the way pain is primarily suffered rather than known, and this is a very important insight for health-care professionals and bioethicists. Many psychiatric (and somatic) diagnoses are more common in one of the sexes, in a certain age group, or in a certain ethnic population, but most other cases of diagnostic skewedness do not seem to be tied to cultural norms in the strikingly clear manner that anorexia nervosa is.
