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This is a wonderful book, possessing that rare insight of a wise clinician who knows from personal experience the condition he undertakes to treat in others. But even more than insightful, this book is courageous and compassionate. It is courageous in its bold attack against culturally imposed dicta, in its encouragement of the fat person to appreciate the value and joy of being fat, and in its vigorous assertion that relief from suffering begins with compassion for oneself. This second element, compassion, so thoroughly fills the book, and is itself so thoroughly explored, that readers familiar with Rubin's work will recognize in this volume his continuing investigation of this vast and difficult area. Whereas in Compassion and Self-Hate he argues generally that compassion is the antidote for self-hate, in this work he demonstrates the specific application of this principle to the issue of obesity in contemporary America.
This book follows Rubin's two previous books on overeating and overweight: The Thin Book by a Formerly Fat Psychiatrist and Forever Thin. To acknowledge, as he does in Alive and Fat and Thinning in America, that he is prejudiced in favor of fat people and fat therapists is an apparent reversal of the point of view taken in his earlier books. Everything in this work, unlike the others, recommends that the fat person may be fat without self-recrimination, whether in connection with the slowness of dieting or the joy of abandon as contrasted to the misery of enforced thinness or the approaches to treatment. Whereas in Forever Thin (still the best clinical psychoanalytic description of the most familiar form of obesity) he presents obesity as essentially an element of a neurotic solution, here he has replaced that entire perspective, seeking instead to help self-hating fat people like themselves more.
This outlook is reflected in Rubin's views of the psychoanalytic treatment of the obese person. He emphasizes for his readers that the psychoanalyst may b