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Frances Sommer Anderson opens her edited book with intimate and thoughtful recollections of her experiences with bodywork. In “At a Loss for Words and Feelings: A Psychoanalyst Reflects on Experiencing Bodywork,” she explains how she initially sought out nonverbal therapies to pursue her long-standing intellectual interest in the mind-body connection and to better understand her patients who were in chronic physical pain. She had her body realigned, stretched, and touched by body workers; in doing so, she was surprised to find herself accessing self-states that talk therapy had, for her, simply not accessed. However, she also found that her bodywork practitioners were often unable to respond helpfully to the emotional and verbal releases their interventions produced. Her book, “Bodies in Treatment: The Unspoken Dimension,” aims to move talk and body therapists closer to one another, so that each appreciates the narrative and the visceral and so that, together, they can care for patients as wholly as possible.
As a clinician who has specialized in eating disorders for many years, in my independent practice and at Barnard College, I was eager to read Anderson's book. Eating-disordered patients relate to others by comparing and contrasting, bodies primarily. The analyst's body, whatever its size and look, provokes these patients and is used transferentially. Eating disorder symptoms also transform bodies: Externally, they affect appearance; internally, they affect physiological and emotional functioning. For example, bulimia puffs cheeks, manipulates weight, and makes eyes red and watery. Purging also confuses metabolism, dehydrates the body, and evacuates emotion. My work with these patients has led me to believe that, for internal change to occur, bodies need to be engaged in treatment.
Anderson organized her book into four parts: Part I, “Bodily Experience in Self-Organization: Contemporary Views,” describes the theory and practice of bodywork. Part II, “Psychoanalyst