E-Book Overview
In this edited volume, Jean Petrucelli brings together the work of talented clinicians and researchers steeped in working with eating disordered patients for the past 10 to 35 years. Eating disorders are about body-states and their relational meanings. The split of mindbody functioning is enacted in many arenas in the eating disordered patient’s life. Concretely, a patient believes that disciplining or controlling his or her body is a means to psychic equilibrium and interpersonal effectiveness. The collected papers in Body-States: Interpersonal and Relational Perspectives on the Treatment of Eating Disorders elaborates the essential role of linking symptoms with their emotional and interpersonal meanings in the context of the therapy relationship so that eating disordered patients can find their way out and survive the unbearable.
The contributors bridge the gaps in varied protocols for recovery, illustrating that, at its core, trust in the reliability of the humanness of the other is necessary for patients to develop, regain, or have - for the first time - a stable body. They illustrate how embodied experience must be cultivated in the patient/therapist relationship as a felt experience so patients can experience their bodies as their own, to be lived in and enjoyed, rather than as an ‘other’ to be managed.
In this collection Petrucelli convincingly demonstrates how interpersonal and relational treatments address eating problems, body image and "problems in living." Body States: Interpersonal and Relational Perspectives on the Treatment of Eating Disorders will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and a wide range of professionals and lay readers who are interested in the topic and treatment of eating disorders.
E-Book Content
Body-States, Petrucelli’s compendium of articles on the causality and treatment of eating disorders, is a major contribution to the literature on this most enigmatic and clinically recalcitrant of syndromes. The contributors, all experienced clinicians, represent mostly an extended interpersonal viewpoint; namely, that the symptoms of eating disorders represent an embodied metaphor for experience with others in a sociocultural matrix. The individual articles are lively, varied, and by no means doctrinaire. This book will be of great interest and value to a wide spectrum of readers. —Edgar A. Levenson, MD, Fellow Emeritus, Training, Supervising Analyst, and Faculty at the William Alanson White Institute; Author of Fallacy of Understanding: The Ambiguity of Change and The Purloined Self While it is usually true that one should not judge a book by its cover, this book may be an exception to that rule. The cover art well captures the disorganized, dissociated, and fragmented minds, bodies, and psychological worlds of many eating-disordered and traumatized people. In Body-States, Jean Petrucelli has produced much more than one would expect from even a first-rate anthology of readings; indeed, this book pushes the envelope of current theory and practice. Drawing on recent developments in interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis, this book provides a model for an interdisciplinary and yet theoretically coherent approach to a complex clinical syndrome. While of obvious value to those who treat patients struggling with eating disorders, this book also serves as a basis for examination of such contemporary clinical ideas as enactment, multiple selfstates, trauma, dissociation, body-states, and non-verbal communications. —Lewis Aron, PhD, Director, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis Nourishment is where we start from, but what happens when food, quite literally, becomes the only real home we have? And what kind of home can food be once it becomes a refuge from rela