Shan Guisinger, Ph.D.

The contributors to the April 2007 American Psychologist special issue on eating disorders are to be commended for acknowledging lack of progress in understanding, classifying, and treating anorexia nervosa (AN). They highlighted the acute need to refine diagnosis (Wonderlich, Joiner, Keel, Williamson, & Crosby, 2007), understand comprehensive causal mechanisms to tune treatments and transcend “hodgepodge diagnoses” (Striegel-Moore & Bulik, 2007, pp. 181–182), study functional neural circuits and link behavior with “genomic, cellular, and systems data” (Chavez & Insel, 2007, p. 164), and develop effective treatments (Wilson, Grilo, & Vitousek, 2007, p. 201). Specifically, Chavez and Insel (2007) wrote that “present-day treatments are significantly limited” and that identifying underlying pathophysiology “will be critical for developing more effective treatments and preventive strategies” (p. 160). This state of the field could suggest that a new paradigm is needed, but new paradigms are often resisted by the established scientific community (Kuhn, 1962), of which the contributors to the special issue are internationally recognized leaders.

Link to Full letter:

Guisinger AP Comment 2008

American Psychologist March 1995

…In addition to emphasizing that natural selection works at the level of the individual, not the society, it is also important to note that the current human genotype is a result of past evolution. Furth (1995) states that we hold that the two ontogenetic developmental lines mentioned in our article have been selected for “the evolutionary advantage this dialectic attains in modern humans” (Furth, 1995, p. 176). If a trait or structure selected over the millions of years of hominid evolution is currently adaptive, that is indeed fortunate; however, “modern” humanity accounts for only a tiny fraction of the time humans and humanlike primates have been on the earth and subject to selection pressures. Thus, these two developmental lines must have been advantageous over a long period of premodern hominid evolution…

Developmental Lines, Schemas, and Archetypes