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Tom Wooldridge Part I
Anorexia Nervosa, Psychic Death, and the Subjugation of Need
Participation available via Zoom Teleconferencing.
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Seminar Description:
Anorexia Nervosa, Psychic Death, and the Subjugation of Need
In a previous paper (Wooldridge, 2018), I developed the notion of the entropic body: a false body (Goldberg, 2004) employed by patients with anorexia nervosa in an attempt to compensate for the failure to internalize maternal comforting functions that could transform catastrophic anxiety into signal anxiety. This body-state (Petrucelli, 2014) develops against a background of profound early trauma in which the environment has repeatedly failed to regulate the child’s anxiety, leaving her unable to regulate her own anxiety or to turn to others for help in doing so. With the term entropic body, I was referring to Freud’s conception of the death drive as aiming toward a state of tension reduction. In this paper, I describe how the anorexic patient’s subjugation of need aims at the phenomenological sphere that Freud (1920) highlighted in his notion of the death drive, which is felt to offer a path toward relief from unbearable annihilation anxiety and a particular form of gratification. In anorexic patients, the dialectical relationship between the forces of life and death has broken down and, thus, the pull toward psychic death has become increasingly compelling.
About the Speaker:
Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, ABPP, CEDS-S is Chair in the Department of Psychology at Golden Gate University as well as a psychoanalyst and board-certified, licensed psychologist. He has published journal articles and book chapters on topics such as eating disorders, masculinity, technology, and psychoanalytic treatment. His first book, Understanding Anorexia Nervosa in Males, was published by Routledge in 2016 and has been praised as “groundbreaking” and a “milestone publication in our field.” His second book, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders: When Words Fail and Bodies Speak, an edited volume in the Relational Perspectives Book Series, was published by Routledge in 2018, and has been well reviewed. His third book, Eating Disorders (New Introductions to Contemporary Psychoanalysis), will be released in 2022. In addition, Dr. Wooldridge has been interviewed by numerous media publications including Newsweek, Slate, WebMD, and others for his work. He is on the Scientific Advisory Council of the National Eating Disorders Association, Faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC) and the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology (NCSPP), an Assistant Clinical Professor at UCSF’s Medical School, and has a private practice in Berkeley, CA.
DATE:
12th November 2022
VENUE:
ONLINE EVENT