ABSTRACT
Working with women obsessed with thinness and exercise as the most important occupations in their lives makes for considerable countertransference challenges to analysts. These patients have had developmental deficits in having mothers/caretakers look and talk about their bodies during the phase when body narcissism develops. They are trying in treatment to repair those deficits. Analysts are trained to listen, not to look, and certainly not to comment about what they see, which is what is required in these cases. Analysts are not willing to join their patients in treating their bodies as a “thing” while also being treated as a “thing,” easily disposable or interchangeable. They must help them to cathect their bodies by mirroring them.
Two extended clinical vignettes demonstrate the importance of “mundane concrete” interventions.
