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THE FIRST HALF of this book looks at eating problems and the clinical demands patients with these difficulties make on their analysts. It shows the ways in which “appetitive desire” (Crastnopol, p. 151) gone wrong creates what can be experienced as unsustainable and uncontain-able hungers that incline individuals to ferociously enact behaviors vis-à-vis food. The individual with an eating problem is attempting to privatize and to solve inside of herself a problematic: How can I manage a need, a desire, an appetite, when need, desire, and appetite have been rendered in me as impermissible, too much or too big?
For the individual with an eating problem, the various negotiations with food—eating, not eating, bingeing, purging, limiting food to certain groups, such as carbohydrates or protein, or avoiding wheat and dairy as a way to control dietary intake—are conceived as solutions to the problem of “appetitive desire.” While their parents, doctors, lovers, friends register their eating behavior as the problem, we are interested in understanding with them why their behaviors appear to them to be a solution to the problem of appetitive desire. We want to enter into the emotional space that allows us and them to see what they are up to when they either refuse to eat when they are hungry, eat more than their bodies can process, or eat only with the intention of ridding themselves of the food. We want them to consider (even if they are initially unable to take the risk) experiencing the sets of feelings and conflicts that eating in accordance with their biological need would engender. We want them to address rather than avoid the psychic difficulties that are encoded in their eating and noneating behaviors. But unless we can understand that