Body-States:Interpersonal and Relational Perspectives on the Treatment of Eating Disorders

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.

Jean Petrucelli is director and co-founder of the Eating Disorders, Compulsions & Addictions Service; supervising analyst, teaching faculty, at the William Alanson White Institute, New York City; adjunct clinical professor of psychology at New York University's postdoctoral program; and editor of several books. She specializes in the interpersonal treatment of eating disorders and addictions, lectures widely throughout the United States, and is in private practice in Manhattan.

Bromberg, Foreword. Petrucelli, 'With a Little Help from My Friends'. Part I: Finding Beauty in the Beast: Interpersonal Perspectives and Treatment of Eating Disorders. Petrucelli, Mermaids, Mistresses & Medusa: Getting 'Inside Out and Outside In' the Relational Montage of an Eating Disorder. Petrucelli, 'My Body Is A Cage': Interfacing Interpersonal Neurobiology, Attachment, Affect Regulation, Self Regulation, and the Regulation of Relatedness in Treatment with Eating Disordered Patients. Part II: The Mindbody and the Bodymind: Reflections Inside and Outside Reality and Subjectivity. Schoen, 'You're The One That I Want': Appetite, Agency, and the Gendered Self. Halsted, 'Stretched To The Limit': The Elastic Body Image in the Reflexive Mind. Ogden, 'I Can See Clearly Now The Rain Has Gone': The Role of the Body in Forecasting the Future. Baker-Pitts, 'Look At Me.....What Am I Supposed To Be?'... Women, Culture and Cosmetic Splitting. Castellano, 'I Won't Grow Up, Never Grow Up, Not Me!': Anorexia Nervosa and Maturity Fears Revisited. Howard, 'Spitting Out the Demons': The Perils of Giving and Receiving for the Anorexic Patient. Part III: Treating the Family, the Young, the Hormonal, and the Religious: Developmental, Familial, and Cultural Contexts. Brisman, 'What's Going On, What's Going On?' -- An Interpersonal Approach to Family Therapy with the Eating Disordered Patient. Ferraro, 'Bridge Over Troubled Waters': Girls' Growing Bodies, Growing Minds, Growing Complications. Kolod, 'The Circle (Cycle) Game': Ovarian Hormones, Self-States and Appetites. Gorden, Kofman, 'Body and Soul': Eating Disorders in the Orthodox Jewish Population. Part IV: Appetite Regulation in an Interpersonal and Cultural Context Tintner, 'These boots aren't made for walking, but that's just what they'll do': The Use of the Detailed Inquiry in the Treatment of Obesity. Malave, 'No Self Control': Working along the Binge Eating Spectrum. Hamilton, 'Sweet Thing': Racially Charged Transferences and Desire in the Interpersonal Treatment of a black American woman with Binge Eating Disorder-- Who Needs Chocolate Cake When You Can Have Chocolate Men? Ackerman, 'Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered': Boundaries Shared and Denied. Sandra Buechler, 'Hooked on a Feeling': Emotions that Facilitate the Movement from Compulsion to Choice - Three Bodies...Patient, Analyst, and Supervisor. Part V: Beyond the Interpersonal and Across the Universe: History; Clinical and Assessment Tools Across Modalities. Gottlieb, 'Come Together': Blending CBT/DBT and Interpersonal Psychotherapy in the Treatment of Eating Disorders. Crossman, Labins, 'One Pill Makes You Larger, And One Pill Makes You Small'...and the Ones that Doctor gives you May or May Not do Anything at All: A brief summary of psychopharmacological approaches in the treatment of eating disorders. Pearlman, Body OR Mind: A Discontinuous Model of Neural Emotional Processing. The BODI GROUP - Members, Baker-Pitts, Bloom, Eichenbaum, Garofallou, Orbach, Jean Petrucelli, Sliva, Tortora, The Acquisition of a Body: Establishing a New Paradigm and Introducing a Clinical Tool to Explore the Intergenerational Transmission of Embodiment. Kuriloff, 'Across the Universe': Christians, Patients, Women with Anorexia Nervosa Then and Now.