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Body image distortions are a normal feature of mental life | Psyche Ideas

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Body image distortions can be severe in anorexia nervosa and bulimia, but they’re also a normal feature of mental life

Your body is the most intimate part of your self – a ubiquitous presence in your life. To know something ‘like the back of your hand’ is to have a profound, even infallible understanding of it. Perhaps you think you have a perfect familiarity with your own body. Yet misperceptions and mental distortions of the body are at the centre of many remarkable clinical problems, and they even appear to some degree in healthy individuals. These phenomena provide a fascinating contrast to the seeming immediacy and directness of the everyday experience of the body. In neurology, for example, patients…

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