I Working with dissociative dynamics and the longing for excess in binge eating disorders

Austin, Sue

doi:10.1111/1468-5922.12009

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 15 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…As Austin (2013) writes, the binge episode is often the only place where these patients can express their raw, explosively aggressive energies. The psyche’s centrifugal dynamics and needs are on full display here.…”

Section: The Centrality Of Aggressionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Binge eating disorder: The subjugation of the “hungry self”.

Wooldridge¹

2022

Psychoanalytic Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The “hungry self” is a self- and body-state (Petrucelli, 2015) characterized by profound need and accompanying frustrated rage that develops because of childhood maltreatment, which is prominent in patients with binge eating disorder (BED). In these patients, this part of the self is sadistically subjugated to a greater or lesser extent by another part of the self, developed through a powerful identification with an abusive parental figure. Binge eating episodes are a channel through which to express these otherwise subjugated affects which remain more-or-less dissociated from the patient’s conscious mind in her day-to-day life. Central to the treatment of BED is the facilitation of the outward expression, in the transference, of aggression, as this supports the patient’s efforts to break free of the experience of emotional subjugation and can, over time, facilitate her capacity to express these important affects in new relational contexts.

show abstract

Section: The Centrality Of Aggressionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Austin (2009Austin ( , 2013 notes, these centrifugal energies and longings are essential to the patient's long-term emotional wellbeing. They are the parts of the patient that need to "explode and destroy" (p. 318) the very structures that maintain the integrity of her psyche.…”

Section: The Centrality Of Aggressionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Binge eating disorder: The subjugation of the “hungry self”.

Wooldridge¹

2022

Psychoanalytic Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Helplessness and the Analyst’s War Against Feeling It

Hoffer

Buie²

2016

Am J Psychoanal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In our view helplessness is a primal, often intolerable feeling. It underlies and intensifies other feelings that are also hard to bear. Both analyst and patients face helplessness, and both resort to defenses, often intensely, in order to avoid it. The intensity of this battle can merit calling it a war. The analyst's war is conducted using distancing, anger, blaming and disparaging as well as by intellectualizing the patient's struggles. Patients then find themselves abandoned and helplessly alone. We analysts, of course, want not to fall into the trap of war, and we try to free ourselves from waging it. A major way we accomplish this is through continuously working, often with the help of analysis and self-analysis, to increase our capacity to maintain our emotional stability in the face of these intensities. We learn to find new forms of awareness, beyond words and ideas. It requires a new understanding of what is threatening to us, which fosters a deeper capacity to empathize with the patient. This helps us to find the psychic, physical and emotional space within ourselves in which to hold our helplessness and other profound affective experiences. In this way we become an increasingly steady resource for our patients as well as for ourselves.

show abstract

II Spatial metaphors and somatic communication: the embodiment of multigenerational experiences of helplessness and futility in an obese patient

2013

J Analytical Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper explores the analysis of an obese woman who came to experience her flesh as a bodying forth of personal and multigenerational family and cultural experiences of helplessness. The paper discusses the ideas and images that formed the basis of how I engaged with these themes as they presented countertransferentially. My thesis is that clinical approaches which draw on spatial metaphors for the psyche offer valuable tools for working with people whose inner world expresses itself somatically because such metaphors can be used to engage simultaneously with the personal, cultural, and ancestral dimensions of these unconscious communications. The paper builds on Jung's view of the psyche as comprised of pockets of inner otherness (complexes), on Redfearn's image of psyche as landscape-like and on Samuels' thinking on embodied countertransference and on the political psyche. It also draws on Butler's work on the body as a social phenomenon and on the theme of being a helpless non-person or nobody as explored in Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead which retells Shakespeare's Hamlet from the perspective of two of the play's 'bit' characters.

show abstract

I Working with dissociative dynamics and the longing for excess in binge eating disorders

Cited by 4 publications

References 15 publications

Binge eating disorder: The subjugation of the “hungry self”.

Binge eating disorder: The subjugation of the “hungry self”.

Helplessness and the Analyst’s War Against Feeling It

II Spatial metaphors and somatic communication: the embodiment of multigenerational experiences of helplessness and futility in an obese patient

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About