The Relational Montage of an Eating Disorder: The Too-Muchness and Not Enough-ness of Desire---What's Food Got to Do with This? (Member)

Title of Workshop:
The Relational Montage of an Eating Disorder: The Too-Muchness and Not Enough-ness of Desire---What's Food Got to Do with This?

Format: Online
Credit: 3 CEUs approved for Psychologists, Social Workers, LPCs/LMFTs and LADCs

Cost:
$100 for Non-Members
$80 for Members - Log into the Member Area to purchase
$20 for *Students - Click here to request a student discount
$0 for current Foundation 1 Students
*(Full-Time Undergraduate, Graduate, Doctoral students, and LMFT, LADC, LPC, Social Work, Psychology, and Psychoanalytic licensure/certification candidates

Speaker: Jean Petrucelli, Ph.D., CEDS-C

Description:

This workshop will begin with an overview and a foundation of understanding eating disorders as multi-determined biopsychosocial disorders with gender being the single best predictor of risk as we explore clinically the interplay of sociocultural, neurobiological, familial and psychological issues creating a perfect storm of vulnerability. Eating disorders are disorders of desire, in which appetite, wanting, and ongoing become dysregulated. There is an unrelenting internal dialogue related to desire--the having or not wanting to want--and the consuming behavioral rituals that briefly quiet these tortuous thoughts cause much suffering. The endless stream of food noise, fear based-judgments, rules demands and threats take over their minds and sometimes drive a life into the ground. It is in the face of these eating disorder thoughts and the difficult emotions and compulsions they provoke, as well as often the experience of denial, that patients must triumph if they are to begin the long road to recovery. The 'self' is derailed and held in the dissociated realm of eating symptoms and body instability with a thwarted sense of agency--a space where dissociation and defensive omnipotence meet--a space where hunger and limits, appetite and choice--desire and wanting are so fraught--they become banished illusions. Interpersonal treatment with patients struggling with eating disorders involves an ongoing complicated negotiation between attending to the direct intervention of the symptom while simultaneously stepping away from the pull to do so. An emphasis on clinical interaction and mutual influence allows us to explore the bodily aspects of communication where the joining of minds and bodies can be both embodied and embodying.

Learning Objectives:

1. Conceptualize interpersonal perspectives in the treatment of anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorders. Exploration of how disordered eating is the psychic inability to care for one's self and to make better clinical use of this perspective through the context of attachment, self-state and body-state theory, self-regulation and affect regulation issues.

2. Conceptualize eating disordered patient's capacities to self-soothe and regulate internal experience, then work more effectively with the relational component of the eating disorder as it plays out in treatment and in the world.

3. Describe the concepts of dissociation and at least one dimension of the theory related to its use in clinical work with patients with eating disorders.

Speaker’s bio:

Jean Petrucelli, Ph.D., CEDS-C, is Director and Co-Founder of the Eating Disorders, Compulsions and Addictions Service since 1995, Training & Supervising Analyst, Faculty, Conference Chair of the Conference Advisory Board (CAB), and Founding Director of the EDCAS educational certificate program at the William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Institute in NYC. She is a Clinical Professor of Psychology and Clinical Consultant at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is an Associate Editor for the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis, editor of seven books including, Body-States: Interpersonal and Relational Perspectives on the Treatment of Eating Disorders (Routledge, 2015), winner of the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis 2016 Edited Book award; and most recently, co-editor with Sarah Schoen of Psychoanalysis and Irreverence (Routledge, 2026). Dr. Petrucelli lectures nationally and internationally and is in private practice in New York City.