ABSTRACT
Almost every approach to working with the fat patient in psychotherapy involves the notion that her fat is the result of trauma in the past and that the answer lies in losing weight, becoming less fat or even better stop being fat at all. But what happens if we begin to think instead that her fat, rather than being a response to trauma or any of the several complexes Woodman outlines, what if her fat is itself a source of trauma, of being fat? What if we look at the effect on the psyche of being visibly different, visibly part of an “injured group”?
