This article presents a literature review of the dominant discourses on anorexia nervosa from Middle Ages to the present. It puts on evidence heroes, villains and victims, culminating in a family systemic look. At the beginning, individuals narratives of saints heroines were prevailing, in the age of the medical thought, these heroines became victims of mental illness. Later, with the anti-psychiatry and family therapy movements, new narratives come into view with more protagonists: the relatives. If, firstly, families are shown as villains, having harmful influences, in the last decades the families became systems that suffer with the impact of the disease. And nowadays narratives have descriptions of competent families that are able to deal with the problem. This article ends with a reflexion about these multiple visions and its implications.
anorexia nervosa; family relations; history