AbstractAmong the diverse psychiatric entities with stagnating monothematic thoughts, anorexia nervosa occupies a significant place as a typical example of a “monoideistic” illness. The dominant idea (about food, dieting, weight loss, and body shape), repeated mentally over and over again and deeply rooted in family and other interpersonal transactions, can engender an hyponotic‐like state. Our interest in anorexia nervosa as one of the most typical monoideistic diseases gained in strength as we noted that in the course of the past 15 years there was an ever‐growing stream of referrals to the Kibbutz Clinic of adolescent girls with anorexia nervosa. For this reason we opened an anorexia nervosa treatment unit and have been able to carry out prospective followups on 66 kibbutz anorectic patients (40 restricters and 26 bulimics) over periods from 4 to 10 years. We were particularly interested in the answer to the question of whether the nosogenesis of the monoideistic pattern, the family and sociocultural factors, and the course and the outcome of the illness are different in the kibbutz population as compared with other s