ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author utilizes the unfolding analysis of a young woman with an eating disorder to illustrate the profound anxieties awakened by the demands of the analytic situation, both its boundaries and its intimacy, and disclose those tensions illustrated in significant dreams. She shows the relationship between her eating disorder and her difficulty in making use of the analytic situation, her clinging to the concrete in preference to the more problematic metabolization of complex and confusing emotions. Patients frequently bring to the analytic situation objections to the boundaries and limitations of that space, their argument with the fundamentally symbolic nature of the psychoanalytic situation. The opposite emotional catastrophes of invasion and abandonment, awakened by the power of the transference and linked to the analytic activities of interpretation within a context of a firm psychoanalytic boundary, frustrations which compel the patient to use an eating disorder: women omnipotent defence.
