In Greek mythology the story of Erysichthon, King of Thessaly, provides one of the earliest depictions of an insatiable hunger and pathological self-consumption. As punishment for having desecrated a sacred grove of Demeter, the goddess afflicted him with an unrelenting appetite. When no food sufficed and all wealth was spent, Erysichthon ultimately fed on his own body. The culmination of the myth is vividly captured by the Roman poet Ovid (43 BCE to 17/18 CE), who writes: ‘He began to tear apart his own limbs with savage bites, and the wretched man fed, diminishing his body’ (Metamorphoses, VIII, 877–8).

References to self-inflicted bodily harm also appear in medieval Christian hagiography, often as expressions of extreme penitence or mystical devotion. Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), for instance, reportedly bit her own hands during states of religious ecstasy and extreme fasting. Historical figures across centuries have exhibited forms of bodily self-consumption – nail-biting, finger-chewing, skin-picking – that modern psychiatry would probably recognise as mild manifestations of autophagia (from the Greek αὐτός (autos), ’self’ + φαγεĩν (phagein), ‘to eat’). Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), French philosopher, in his Essais, refers to the habit of ‘ronger les ongles’ as one of the bodily automatisms through which anxiety expresses itself. The Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), afflicted by chronic illness and melancholy, was described by contemporaries as habitually biting his fingers during long periods of philosophical labour. The French writer Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), in moments of agitation and withdrawal, was said to torment his hands until they bled.

It was not until the 19th century that self-injurious behaviours began to be documented systematically within clinical neurology and psychiatry. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) observed patients biting themselves during catatonia or psychosis. In 1962, William Nyhan (b. 1926) and Michael Lesch (b. 1939) described the eponymous syndrome, marked by compulsive self-biting – particularly of the lips and fingers – caused by an enzyme deficiency. Today, autophagia is recognised as a spectrum of behaviours, ranging from benign nail-biting to extreme forms of self-mutilation. It is often associated with impulse-control disorders, obsessive–compulsive spectrum traits, psychosis and neurodevelopmental conditions. A related phenomenon is dermatophagia – the compulsive biting of one’s own skin, particularly around the fingers – now grouped under the category of body-focused repetitive behaviours (BFRBs). Among psychiatric illnesses, severe anorexia nervosa offers a striking variant: self-starvation can induce a form of cellular autophagia in the liver, where hepatocytes degrade their own components – a microscopic parallel to the body consuming itself.

In modern literature, the image of self-consumption persists as metaphor. In Survivor Type (1985), the American writer Stephen King (b. 1947) imagines a surgeon stranded on a desert island who gradually amputates and consumes his own body parts to survive. King’s fictional surgeon and Ovid’s Erysichthon, separated by two millennia, share a common fate: the act of consuming oneself – whether mythical, behavioural or cellular – remains a potent image of collapse, where survival instincts and self-destruction tragically converge.