Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders – Tom Wooldridge

Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders – Tom Wooldridge

Description:

Psychoanalytic thinking offers valuable insights to clinicians working with eating disorders and body image concerns. In a field that increasingly emphasizes rapid symptom reduction, treatment providers risk neglecting less overt, and less easily measurable, aspects of the patient’s experience. This presentation will bring together the latest thinking about how a psychoanalytic approach can help us to understand the emotional experience of an eating disorder more deeply. As a member of a larger treatment team, the psychoanalytic psychotherapist assists the patient in contending with an internal landscape marked by isolation and loneliness as well as shame, guilt, and embarrassment, not to mention a profound hopelessness about the possibilities of emotional connection. In this presentation, we will discuss the role of the psychoanalytic thinking within a broader therapeutic approach and several common psychodynamic themes commonly observed in patients with eating disorders.

Outline:

The Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist as a Member of the Larger Treatment Team
Alexithymia and Deficits in Symbolic Functioning
Object Relations and Traumatic Themes
Self-States and Dissociation
Self-States and Body Imaginings
Limitations of the Research and Potential Risks
FITNESS – HEALTH – MEDICAL Course

More information about Medical:

Medicine is the science and practice of establishing the diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, and prevention of disease.
Medicine encompasses a variety of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness.

Contemporary medicine applies biomedical sciences, biomedical research, genetics, and medical technology to diagnose, treat, and prevent injury and disease,
typically through pharmaceuticals or surgery, but also through therapies as diverse as psychotherapy, external splints and traction, medical devices, biologics, and ionizing radiation, amongst others.

Medicine has been around for thousands of years, during most of which it was an art (an area of skill and knowledge) frequently having connections to the religious and philosophical beliefs of local culture.

For example, a medicine man would apply herbs and say prayers for healing, or an ancient philosopher and physician would apply bloodletting according to the theories of humorism.
In recent centuries, since the advent of modern science, most medicine has become a combination of art and science (both basic and applied, under the umbrella of medical science).

While stitching technique for sutures is an art learned through practice.

The knowledge of what happens at the cellular and molecular level in the tissues being stitched arises through science.