Eating disorders present particular treatment challenges to clinicians in how they engage with and welcome bodies – their patients and their own – into the therapeutic dialogue. Interpersonal treatment with patients struggling with eating disorders involves an ongoing complicated negotiation. This negotiation is between attending to the direct intervention of the symptom while simultaneously stepping away from the pull to do so. The goal is to explore what an intervention means to the patient and ultimately to understand what role the symptom plays in the patient’s intra-psychic and interpersonal world.
Dr. Jean Petrucelli will present an approach to the treatment of anorexia, bulimia and binge eating disorder beyond symptom alleviation with the initial phase involving direct symptom intervention within the framework of an interpersonally based analytic treatment. With an eye towards understanding the neurobiological underpinnings and the implications of these findings in treatment, the concepts of attachment theory, self regulation, affect regulation, dissociation, and the multiplicity of self-states and body-states theory will be viewed as interpersonal constructs. Cultural influence, etiology, clinical conundrums, counter transferential reactions, roadblocks and treatment goals will be considered in developing an understanding of how to reach these often "unreachable" patients. Issues related to body obsession, diagnosis, assessing the level of care, appetite, creating contracts and food charts will be presented as part of the bridge one builds to enter the ritual-filled world of the eating disordered-patient.
Jean Petrucelli, Ph.D. is Director and Co-Founder of the Eating Disorders, Compulsions and Addictions Service since 1995, Supervising Analyst, Teaching Faculty, White Institute Conference Advisory Board Chair, and Founding Director of the EDCAS one year educational certificate program at the William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Institute in NYC. She is an Adjunct Clinical Professor and Co-Chair of the Faculty and Curriculum committee for the Interpersonal/Humanistic Track at NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Teaching Faculty at ICP; and Associate Editor for the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Dr. Petrucelli is Editor of the books Body-States: Interpersonal and Relational Perspectives on the Treatment of Eating Disorders (Routledge, 2015); Knowing, Not-Knowing & Sort-of-Knowing: Psychoanalysis and the Experience of Uncertainty (Karnac Books, 2010); Longing: Psychoanalytic Musings on Desire (Karnac Books, 2006); and Co-editor of the book Hungers and Compulsions: The Psychodynamic Treatment of Eating Disorders and Addictions (Rowen & Littlefield., 2001 & 2009). She is in private practice on the upper west side in Manhattan.
Doors open at 8:30am and free parking is available.
