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Tom Wooldridge sets himself an ambitious task for this slim volume, part of Routeldge's series of Contemporary Introductions. He hopes it will serve as an introduction to psychoanalytic thinking for clinicians already working in the field of Eating Disorders, as well as providing an overview of the contemporary understanding of this patient group for those familiar with psychoanalytic ideas, students and more general readers. It is a sign of his considerable skill as a writer but foremost as a conceptualiser of the inner world of patients suffering from eating disorders that he achieves all of this and more.
The book aims to consolidate the important accumulation of thinking about eating disorders that the psychoanalytic community has contributed over many decades. Treatment of mental health conditions with such high mortality rates as eating disorders have (understandably) emphasised interventions focused on symptom reduction and management. Wooldridge hopes in this book to draw our attention to the underlying psychological difficulties which may remain, even if the patient experiences a full recovery from the eating-related symptoms following treatment.
I was asked to review this book in my capacity as a trainee psychodynamic psychotherapist whose MA dissertation was in the area of eating disorders. This involved conducting a literature review of psychodynamic writing on the subject of anorexia, where I came across Wooldridge's previous overview of this area: ‘Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders: When Words Fail and Bodies Speak’ (Routledge, ). That volume provided a much-needed bringing together of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking on disordered eating, including contributions from Kathryn J. Zerbe, Danielle Novack and others. It also contains a chapter by Wooldridge himself on pro-anorexia Internet forums, some of which is repurposed in the excellent final chapter of this volume. Whilst that collection gained breadth from its array of contributors, Woo