ABSTRACT
When her bulimic patient reports a terrifying recurrent dream and insists that she “just can’t think,” the author make use of W. R. Bion’s psychoanalytic metaphor on thinking to interpret the enactments of the patient’s binge/purge eating disorder. She understands the patient’s bingeing as her ongoing and literal attempt at finding a ‘thinking’ connection to her mother via the feeding, and her purging as the patient’s attempt at eliminating her terrifying and toxic feelings in a literal, physical way. The author suggests that an infant who goes on to develop a binge/purge eating disorder becomes her own “toxic container” (Kullman, 2007, p. 714) holding and storing her own undigestible distress in and on her own body while continuing her efforts at eliminating it—in what becomes a “closed-circuit loop” of psychic and somatic perseveration” (p. 714). The chapter shows how this patient’s dream and the author’s interpretation of it laid the foundation for her theory of the early etiology and evolution of binge/purge eating disorders and the perseverant personality organization that she believes fosters their development.
