ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book begins with an explanation of the psychoanalytic understanding of eating disorders and discusses the development of the self and possible disturbances in this process. The case was made that there is a growing body of literature pointing to underlying cognitive deficits in eating disorder sufferers that may account for some of the difficulties experienced by this group. The book describes a unified theory by describing how eating disorder patients might be vulnerable to triggering brain pathways that, under stress, fail to reach the symbolic language emotional processing functions. It explores the concept of the degradation of the figurative/metaphoric content of language of the emotional trigger as it collapses towards the concrete. It is this collapse, it is posited, which stimulates concrete action.
