Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis Seminar Series

Seminar Description and Overview:

Individuals with eating disorders tend to feel alienated from their needs and their hunger, creating a gap in self-reflection. These patients struggle to use somatic and affective cues as self-signals, deepening the gap in self-understanding and self-care. Similarly, the caregiver may struggle to provide regulation and meaningful connections, which can include family, friends, and even the clinician. Severe symptoms of anorexia often seem un-budgeable, and bulimia can be equally stubborn. While interdisciplinary collaboration is essential, we expand our psychoanalytic inquiry from a trailing-edge interpretation of self-harming motives toward curiosity about the multiple and leading-edge functions of these behaviors as growth-seeking.

Kafka’s short story "A Hunger Artist" evocatively illustrates how the symptoms of anorexia can represent acts of self-negation while serving as a bid for recognition and self-determination. For those who rely on restrictive behaviors, the act of withholding—whether food, desire, or recognition—serves as both a defense against intolerable longing and an assertion of identity. The act of disappearing becomes a way to exist. In two clinical reports, Mendelsohn and Ferguson explore how disordered eating offers a transient solution, regulating unbearable affects while expressing nascent selfhood. How do we balance our therapeutic goal of protecting our patients from self-endangerment while registering and honoring their striving for self-cohesion and selfhood? Taking a phenomenological clinical approach, patients’ eating disorder presentations become an object of analytic curiosity and a character in the patient’s story.

This two-hour seminar begins with two clinical presentations, followed by a 45-minute Q&A and discussion period. Participants are encouraged to bring case material and challenging clinical moments.