ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the understanding of 'psychically porous' patients who suffer eating disorders and who tend to be more frequently bulimic than anorexic. These patients seem to bear an intriguing similarity with those described, from a different perspective, in recent child development research, as belonging to a fourth, new category of attachment, the 'disorganised, disoriented' pattern of attachment. This chapter focuses on the predicament of patients who receive back their own projections, which is the predicament described by Wilfred Bion as 'nameless dread'. A mother who cannot deal with her own psychic states will indeed send back the child's projections, but the chapter's focus is on the experience of patients whose parents need to divest themselves of their own anxieties, psychic pain, and ghosts. It describes in some detail the work with a bulimic male patient named Daniel, who had remained highly porous indeed to parental projections.
