ABSTRACT
The vast majority of work done on obesity totally ignores the psychological meaning of eating behaviour and focuses on underlying physiological processes and desirable lifestyles. In the field of feminist psychoanalytic writing, especially, a huge amount of work has been carried out and, moreover, explored in an unusually accessible form. The only possible conclusion is that the insights of psychoanalysis will remain in the private domain unless they can be presented in a way that meets the preoccupations of funders. The first is that psychoanalytic writers came to conclusions about the emotional meanings of obesity that replicate reports by other psychoanalytic researchers and that therefore may be of value for practitioners. The review of a range of psychoanalytically informed work done on obesity, with the sole exception of that done by R. Ciano and colleagues, concludes that the work is strongly suggestive of common themes relevant to the development of obesity in the emotional lives of obese people.
