Embodied Liminality Inhabiting Selves: Reflections On Papers By Sheehy and Wooldridge

Abstract

Patients with eating disorders struggle with the ability to regulate amounts, concretely and symbolically, and we, as therapists, witness and are always subject to the too much-ness and the not enough-ness as they are played out in continuous enactments in the analytic dyad. Wooldridge and Sheehy’s contributions highlight our challenges in looking at the ways in which such difficulties in regulation evoke relationships to important attachment figures that are then enacted in the interpersonal field. I reflect on these papers through a relational perspective that places more emphasis on the therapist’s integrated participation and curiosity about their participation in enactments. A two-person theoretical model of patient’s problems and of therapeutic action can expand the exploration of how self-regulation is rooted in mutual regulation and dysregulation, and how such exploration can be ultimately transformative in the interpersonal field.

Keywords:

• anorexia
• self-states
• mutual regulation
• vitalization
• regulating relatedness

Notes

1 Editors’ Note: It is highly unusual for the Editors-in-Chief of Contemporary Psychoanalysis to invite and publish reflections on peer reviewed articles, as some other psychoanalytic journals do. An exception was made in this case for two reasons: (1) These articles on the subject of eating disorders have very different approaches, calling for our “in-house” expert on the subject, Jean Petrucelli, to respond; and (2) our Special Section on Intersectionality (this issue) also includes reflections that were solicited by Max Belkin, who proposed the topic of intersectionality and who guest edited the articles that this section contains.

2 For a complete history of this tale- https://torontopubliclibrary.typepad.com/arts_culture/2021/01/the-three-bears-before-goldilocks-the-history-of-a-fairy-tale.html

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jean Petrucelli

Jean Petrucelli, Ph.D., CEDS, Training & Supervising Analyst, Faculty, Director & Co-Founder of the Eating Disorders, Compulsions and Addictions Service (EDCAS); Conference Advisory Board (CAB) Committee Chair at The William Alanson White Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Associate Clinical Professor & Clinical Consultant for NYU’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis; Adjunct Faculty at ICP; Associate Editor for Contemporary Psychoanalysis; Editor of five books: including Body-States: Interpersonal and Relational Perspectives on the Treatment of Eating Disorders (Routledge, 2015).