Exploring Eating Disorders in Adolescents

Jane Desmarais is Deputy Head of English in the Department of English & Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is co-author with Lawrence Goldie of 'Psychotherapy and the Treatment of Cancer Patients: Bearing Cancer in Mind' (Routledge, 2005), and author and editor of a number of books, essays and articles on psychoanalysis, literature and visual arts. She is co-editor of two volumes on eating disorders in children and adolescents, and has written on anorexia and passive resistance in Hermann Melville's 1853 tale, 'Bartleby'. She is currently working on a series of projects about Decadence, including a book on skin based on the work of Didier Anzieu's 'Le Moi-Peau'. Gianna Williams trained as a child and adult therapist and was part of the teaching staff of the Tavistock Clinic in the 1970s and later Consultant Psychotherapist at the Adolescent Department of the Tavistock, where in 1987 she founded the Eating Disorders Workshop. She has taught at the Tavistock Clinic and University of East London, and the Universities of Pisa and Bologna and has founded numerous courses based on the Tavistock model in Italy, France and Latin America. Paul Williams is a training and supervising analyst with The British Psychoanalytical Society and a member of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He was a consultant psychotherapist in the British National Health Service, retiring in 2010. From 2001-2007 he was Joint Editor-in-Chief, with Glen O. Gabbard, of the 'International Journal of Psychoanalysis'. He has published widely on the subject of severe disturbance. He lives and practises in Hampshire, UK.

'Many cases describe the anxieties and strategies of defence used against feelings of dependence and the risk of accepting from another. This is a core theme in both volumes and is the principal idea behind the paradoxical title, The Generosity of Acceptance. This title applies primarily to the struggle of some patients to accept from another, to become dependent on another, but it also refers to the need of clinicians to accept generously the sometimes violent projections of their patients. The gift of help often involves a risk of rejection, and the chapters in these two volumes vividly describe the courage and generosity it takes to persevere with patients suffering from serious eating disorders.'From the IntroductionContributors to Volume II include Sue Brough, Helene Dubinsky, Jeanne Magagna, Roberta Mondadori, Diomira Petrelli, Emanuela Quagliata, Kent Ravenscroft, Luisa Carbone Tirelli

• Introduction -- "Who's that girl?" An anorexic girl's search for identity and fear of contamination by the damaged (internal) parental couple -- Eating disorders in adolescence: the function of receiving -- Paula's secret: an adolescent with bulimia -- The uncovering of a lack of identity -- "I didn't want to die, but I had to": the pervasive refusal syndrome -- Some reflections on the processes of projection and introjection in eating disorders -- An anorexic girl's relationship to a very damaged persecutory internal object and its impact on her illness -- Fantasies concerning body functioning in an anorexic adolescent