ABSTRACT
In her study of theory and praxis, sociologist Edith Kurzweil (1989, p. 1) determines that “Every country creates the psychoanalysis it needs.” Confirming today’s well-worn wisdom that there is, indeed, no transcendent truth, Kurzweil implies something more regarding place and psychoanalytic sensibilities. What needs, what desires, what hungers, she prompts us to consider, has psychoanalysis fulfilled in the global north from era to era? Then consider the very problem of desire itself, well expressed in the syndrome of Anorexia Nervosa or food refusal, a behavior women, for the most part, have engaged throughout history, and certainly from the beginning of the psychoanalytic era. Besides a means to manage an individual’s symptoms and pain, I suggest that psychoanalytic designs regarding volitional hunger and wasting are both responsive to, and responsible for the shifting positions and identities of women in and out of the treatment room, in both modern and postmodern times.
