Body-States: Interpersonal and Relational Perspectives on the Treatment of Eating Disorders (Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series)

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 socio-cultural 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 self-states, trauma, dissociation, body states and non-verbal communications. - Lewis Aron, Ph.D. 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 relationship, from freer exchanges? Once it becomes a home from home? In Body-States we have a book that renews our appetite for these fundamental contemporary questions. With a remarkable range of wit and sympathy, of generosity and intelligence, Body-States frees us to think differently about these elemental things. Eating disorders, like all the other so-called disorders, lead us to believe that somewhere there can be an appropriate order. The essays in Body-States, in their range and their engagement, show us how we might talk about eating now without telling people how they should live. - Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst and writer.

Open this volume and prepare for an educational feast! The editor, Jean Petrucelli, has once again assembled a superb collection of innovative contributions on the psychodynamic treatment of eating disorders. Impressive in scope, depth and understanding, this text is a filled with papers that are at once wise, practical, theoretically sophisticated, yet highly readable. The essays will appeal to all thoughtful clinicians who seek to integrate contemporary relational approaches with other treatment modalities and cultural considerations into their practice. Specialists in the field of eating disorders will find it an essential reference, laced with examples that offer refreshing insight, hope, and savvy clinical guidance. - Kathryn J. Zerbe, MD, FAED, Training and Supervising Analyst, Oregon Psychoanalytic Center Author: The Body Betrayed: Women, Eating Disorders, and Treatment and Integrated Treatment of Eating Disorders: Beyond the Body Betrayed.

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.