Hungers and Compulsions

Hungers and Compulsions, written primarily by colleagues who espouse an interpersonal/relational perspective, will be of interest to clinicians who follow other approaches as well. The reader is offered vivid accounts of close encounters with very challenging patients. Two leitmotifs of the book are the place of insight vs. affective engagement in the curative process, and the love-hate relationship with Freud and Ferenczi that many psychotherapists share. The final section on the ill-starred Winnicott/Khan relationship is a timely coda. -- Arnold D. Richards M.D., editor, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Assocation
Petrucelli and Stuart bring together a diverse set of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic writers who address the issues of eating disorders, compulsions, and addictions from multiple perspectives. The authors focus on clinical material and explore psychoanalytically informed treatment. For a clinician working with any of the identified disorders or issues in this book, these collected writings can help inform their clinical practice and expand their knowledge of treatment. * Contemporary Psychology: The Apa Review Of Books *
This book offers a wise, often inspired, guide to the treatment of patients who present with eating disorders and other addictive behavior. Any clinician can learn from this inside view of the demands that working with this difficult group of patients places on their therapists. And the book is more, because taken together the chapters constitute a discourse on fundamental questions about human desire and will, and about our need to live authentically and creatively. I recommend it highly to everyone interested in treating eating disordered patients and to everyone who wants to understand the thinking of contemporary relationally oriented psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. -- Jay Greenberg, Ph.D., training and supervising analyst, The William Alanson White Institute
This is a marvelous collection; its important insights continue to inspire and inform. It challenges overly simplistic understandings of the deep human needs and profound psychic pain embodied in people’s struggles with eating disorders and addictions. It reminds us how this pain is compounded when it goes unaddressed and unrecognized. And it provides clinicians across disciplines with creative ways to think anew about how we can be there for our patients. -- Susie Orbach, Psychoanalyst, writer, author of Fat is a Feminist Issue