ABSTRACT
Many people are starving to death emotionally. Emotional starvation takes many forms and is part of a wide range of disorders. Emotional starvation is converted into physical hunger, which she fights and gives into. The image of an ocean metabolizing waste is expressive of the unconscious processes metabolizing emotional pollutants. The background tapestry of being failed to develop in ways that supported, enriched, and strengthened a sense of generative opening. Therapy too provides an alternate ideology to the self-defeating ideology of control that stamped Sheila’s thinking since childhood. People who are emotionally starving to death may, paradoxically, feel that even a little emotion is too much, yet no matter how much they get, it is too little. To complicate matters, Sandy shares Mara’s feeling that direct emotional contact is what counts, that his intellectual life is defensive.
