ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the past and present innovations within the interpersonal tradition in the clinical treatment of eating disorders. It considers 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. The chapter explores Hilde Bruch, Edgar Levenson, Judith Brisman, and Jean Baker Miller, studies in eating disorder symptoms and its treatment. In 1995, at The William Alanson White Institute in New York, Jean Petrucelli and the late Catherine Stuart established the first center for eating disorders in a psychoanalytic setting, revolutionary for its focus on so called manifest content or symptomatology rather than exclusively upon latent or symbolic interpretation of "meaning". It has principles of interpersonal psychoanalysis that are integrated with many other treatment modalities.
