Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders

"A report from the front; the unconscionable front, which has brought an assault on our bodies, with its devastating price on individuals and families. Here is the work of clinicians who engage with the troubled bodies and eating of our times as they theorise their understandings and learning. There is much to learn here."

-- Susie Orbach is a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist, co-founder of The Women's Therapy Centre. Her books include Fat is a Feminist Issue, Hunger Strike, and the award winning Bodies. Her most recent is In Therapy, annotated sessions from her BBC Radio series of the same name.

"Tom Wooldridge has assembled an impressive array of contributors to offer a rich and valuable survey of the contemporary psychodynamic approach to eating disorders. New therapeutic conceptualizations, including mentalization- and emotion regulation-based strategies, are applied to the special circumstances involved in eating disorders. At the same time, the deep traditional analytic insights are included and updated: Freudian, Kleinian, newer Object Relational, Developmental Psychoanalytic, and Self Psychology. All of this is coordinated with an interest in the effects of contemporary culture on how eating disorders develop and present, including attention to the "pro-anorexia" groupings emerging on the Internet and the occurrence of eating disorders in boys and men. This book will be invaluable to any practitioner working with such patients, and of significant interest to all."

- Stephen Seligman, D.M.H.

Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco; author of Relationships in Development: Infancy, Intersubjectivity, and Attachment; Joint Editor-in-Chief, Psychoanalytic Dialogues; Training and Supervising Analyst, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California & San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis

"Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders: When Words Fail and Bodies Speak is an indispensable volume of psychoanalytically informed contributions to the literature on eating disorders. This irresistible recipe combines one part theory with two parts clinical wisdom. I was especially drawn to the treatment of the roles of specific emotions, like shame and anxiety. Equally useful for the seasoned clinician and those at earlier stages of their careers, this is a worthy addition to any clinician's library. These 15 authors represent the best in the field."

- Sandra Buechler, Ph.D. Author of Understanding and Treating Patients in Clinical Psychoanalysis: Lessons from Literature. Training and Supervising Analyst, the William A. White Institute, New York.

"Wooldridge provides us with a valuable collection of papers on the conceptualization and treatment of eating disorders. He also presents us with several chapters on contemporary cultural issues, including social media, which impact patients with eating disorders. Wooldridge and the contributing authors are keenly aware that eating disordered patients are among the most difficult to treat. These patients present clinicians with potentially life threatening crises and the possible need for substantial ancillary care. These assembled authors do not shy away from the thorny problem of combining psychoanalytic containment and understanding with the variations in frame needed to ensure safety, such as the potential necessity for a treatment team and hospitalization."

- Mary Brady, Ph.D., Author of The Body in Adolescence: Psychic Isolation and Physical Symptoms

"For too long there has been a divide between psychoanalytic thinking and the treatment of eating disorders. This vital collection of essays is a key step in bridging that gap. Through vivid clinical examples, new theoretical advances are illuminated in ways that promise to deepen our understanding of eating disorders. With impressive clarity, this collection is a vital addition to the field that will extend what we understand as psychoanalytic. It will be of real value to both students and seasoned clinicians."

- Peter Carnochan, Ph.D., Author of Looking for Ground: Countertransference and the Problem of Value in Psychoanalysis (Relational Perspectives Book Series) ​

"This anthology of papers offers its readers what a skillful psychoanalytic treatment can offer an eating disordered patient: it reintroduces meaning, metaphor, and substance into an otherwise concrete, impoverished, and symptom dominated existence. As editor, Wooldridge had brought together an impressive anthology of papers that integrates multiple psychoanalytic perspectives. Without minimizing the need for symptom management with eating disordered patients, Wooldridge's emphasis is on integrating classical psychoanalytic conceptualizations of eating disorders with contemporary psychoanalytic thinking, on development, phenomenology, affect regulation, dissociation, attachment, mentalization, and socio-cultural context. The individual chapters are theoretically and clinically rich, varied, thought provoking, and useful. They will nourish and hold both beginning and seasoned clinicians in their struggle to find words that can touch and transform those patients for whom words have perilously failed."

- Sarah Schoen, PhD, Supervising Analyst and Faculty at the William Alanson White Institute; Faculty at NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and Co-Editor of Unknowable, Unspeakable, and Unsprung: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Scandal, Truth, Secrets and Lies.