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This practical, accessible book teaches readers how to practice healthy body image habits and let go of an emphasis on body image through research, activities, and personal stories.Body neutrality is a body image approach focused on finding acceptance and liberation from the body-focused culture in which we live. Body neutrality is a shift toward seeing our bodies as a vessel of who we are rather than as who we are. This guide is organized into thirteen chapters, each outlining a different concept of body neutrality ranging from comparison and identity to mindfulness and gratitude, inviting participation from the reader through end-of-chapter activities. For anyone aiming to release the enslaving emphasis placed on appearance in a world where body obsession has become inappropriately “normal,” this book will provide insight and practical guidance toward freedom.Body Neutrality is for anyone struggling with self-esteem and body image issues who aims for acceptance and liberation.

Clay Work and Body Image in Art Therapy provides an important addition to resources available in the field of clay work and art therapy, highlighting the unique sensory aspects of the medium and its ability to provide a therapeutic resource for women who experience body image issues.Chapters offer a comprehensive distillation of current knowledge in the field of body image, clay work, neuroscience, and art therapy, building a theoretical framework around personal narratives. Case studies examine the benefits of exploring body image through clay work within art therapy practice, providing a positive and contained way to find personal acceptance and featuring photographs of clay body image sculptures created by research participants that highlight their individual stories and experiences. As well as offering both clinical and practical implications, the text provides a full protocol for the research and evaluation methods carried out, enabling further replication of the intervention and research methods by other therapists. This book highlights clay work as a significant resource for art therapists, arts in health practitioners, and counsellors, providing an emotive yet contained approach to the development of personal body image acceptance and self-compassion.

Winner of the 2022 Gradiva® Award for Best Edited Book! This book explores the role of bodily phenomena in mental life and in the psychoanalytic encounter, encouraging further dialog within psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the humanities, and contributing new clinical and theoretical perspectives to the recent resurgence of psychoanalytic interest in the body. Presented in six parts in which diverse meanings are explored, Body as Psychoanalytic Object focuses on the clinical psychoanalytic encounter and the body as object of psychoanalytic inquiry, spanning from the prenatal experience to death. The contributors explore key themes including mind–body relations in Winnicott, Bion, and beyond; oneiric body; nascent body in early object relations; body and psychosensory experience; body in breakdown; and body in virtual space. With clinical vignettes throughout, each chapter provides unique insight into how different analysts work with bodily phenomena in the clinical situation and how it is conceived theoretically. Building on the thinking of Winnicott and Bion, as well as contributions from French psychoanalysis, Body as Psychoanalytic Object offers a way forward in a body-based understanding of object relations theory for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

Have you ever been praised or criticized about your body or any part of it? With this question, participants of a research study were invited to share their experiences of body judgment. As participants described, the body is a carrier of messages and the source of judgmental experiences. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Gaze, Body Image, Shame, Judgment and Maternal Function: Being and Belonging offers an insightful and engaging psychoanalytical account of experiences of shame and fear of rejection, explained through clinical vignettes and research participants'scripts. Exploring the findings from the individual and social standpoints, as well as the cultural and historical influences, Dr. Roth proposes that judgements are experienced as attacks, with the meaning attributed to the criticized body part, affecting the sense of self and forming a central point of the participants'identity trauma. Furthermore, that as guilt requires reparative action, shame requires an act of sacrifice to align the individual to the ideal and to preserve the matrix of belonging, thus explaining the participants'use of alienation as a defense. This book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, as well as scholars of culture and religion. Giving a brief introduction to psychoanalytic concepts, with a full glossary, it will also appeal to the non-psychoanalytic reader, interested in body image and how related perceptions and judgements can affect our own sense of Being and Belonging.

Patients in psychoanalytic treatment present with a variety of problems that reflect contemporary cultural issues and values. Clinical Evolutions on the Superego, Body, and Gender in Psychoanalysis explores the effects of such societal changes on psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, covering topics such as greed, envy and deception, body narcissism, gender roles, and relationships. Janice S. Lieberman includes numerous clinical vignettes and insights into working clinically with changing norms. Lieberman explores how changes in values and norms of behavior in the world beyond the consulting room have influenced what is now heard by analysts within it, using clinical data to demonstrate the psychological underpinnings of the values promulgated by current trends in politics and in society more widely. She explores what she observes to be'a new superego'; where deception abounds and often goes unpunished, where greed and envy have arguably increased and there is an enhanced emphasis on the body and its appearance. Traditional gender roles have been challenged in fortuitous ways, but a certain amount of chaos and confusion has ensued. Relationships are found and maintained using technology, yet many feel lonely and empty. She writes about the clinical dilemmas she has faced and offers suggestions for resolving them in working with today's patients. Lieberman also sees parallels for these developments in several artists'lives and in their work. Clinical Evolutions on the Superego, Body, and Gender in Psychoanalysis will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

Unconscious Incarnations considers the status of the body in psychoanalytic theory and practice, bringing Freud and Lacan into conversation with continental philosophy to explore the heterogeneity of embodied life. By doing so, the body is no longer merely an object of scientific inquiry but also a lived body, a source of excessive intuition and affectivity, and a raw animality distinct from mere materiality. The contributors to this volume consist of philosophers, psychoanalytic scholars, and practitioners whose interdisciplinary explorations reformulate traditional psychoanalytic concepts such as trauma, healing, desire, subjectivity, and the unconscious. Collectively, they build toward the conclusion that phenomenologies of embodiment move psychoanalytic theory and practice away from representationalist models and toward an incarnational approach to psychic life. Under such a carnal horizon, trauma manifests as wounds and scars, therapy as touch, subjectivity as bodily boundedness, and the unconscious ‘real'as an excessive remainder of flesh. Unconscious incarnations signal events where the unsignifiable appears among signifiers, the invisible within the visible, and absence within presence. In sum: where the flesh becomes word and the word retains its flesh. Unconscious Incarnations seeks to evoke this incarnational approach in order to break through tacit taboos toward the body in psychology and psychoanalysis. This interdisciplinary work will appeal greatly to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as philosophy scholars and clinical psychologists.

Now selected for the Reading Well for mental health booklist.This book is brought to you by Trigger, as part of our innovative and philanthropic Pullingthetrigger range. Find out more at www.triggerpublishing.com.Written by a woman who has suffered from debilitating body image issues and two leading clinical psychologists, this book provides simple yet highly effective self-help methods to help you overcome body image concerns and Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD). In Part I we follow Chloe Catchpole's desperate struggle with her body dissatisfaction, BDD, and depression. We learn how body dysmorphia tore her life apart, turning a happy, sociable young girl into someone who hid herself away from the world. She was so afraid of being seen in public that she dropped out of school and became a prisoner in her own bedroom. It wasn't until Chloe met clinical psychologists Lauren Callaghan and Annemarie O'Connor that she started to believe recovery was possible. With their help, she learned about the illness that was dominating her life and learned effective strategies to challenge and overcome her BDD. In Part II, Lauren and Annemarie guide us through the treatment and recovery approach that they used with Chloe. It is a user-friendly, evidence-based approach which supports people suffering from body image issues and BDD as they go through the treatment process, liberating them from their body image concerns.

False Bodies, True Selves explores the phenomenon of growing numbers of people in western society and beyond completely embedding their sense of identity in their appearance. Unlike other books which address either theoretical models of appearance-focused identity struggles or explore lived experiences of appearance-based battles, False Bodies delves into both. Importantly, the spiritual aspects of what it is to become enemies with one's body are given centre stage in the context of Donald Winnicott's theory of the true Self and the false Self. The book begins by looking at some of the myths, superstitions and fairy tales related to mirrors before moving on to western society's current obsession with appearance, which seems to have been compounded by the mass media. After looking at some of the most common manifestations of appearance-focused anguish including eating disorders and body dysmorphia, it begins to unpick the possible underlying meanings beneath such struggles with a particular emphasis on issues of a systemic nature.

Regardless of your client's diagnosis or presenting problems, they're likely to be concerned about their weight. And that impacts treatment.Noted expert on eating and weight disorders, Edward Abramson, PhD, has created the definitive guide to help you approach weight issues and questions clients will have. Easy to read and highly practical, you'll be able to give your clients sound advice and develop realistic plans to manage their weight and feel good about their bodies. How to turn the whys of eating into treatment strategiesDiets, drugs and surgeries -- what you must knowSimple environmental changes that decrease eatingTools to assess and improve body imageTips to make exercise easier (and enjoyable!)

Popular interest in body image issues has grown dramatically in recent years, due to an emphasis on individual responsibility and self-determination in contemporary society as well as the seemingly limitless capacities of modern medicine; however body image as a separate field of academic inquiry is still relatively young. The contributors of Body Image and Identity in Contemporary Societies explore the complex social, political and aesthetic interconnections between body image and identity. It is an in-depth study that allows for new perspectives in the analysis of contemporary visual art and literature but also reflects on how these social constructs inform clinical treatment. Sukhanova and Thomashoff bring together contributions from psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists and scholars in the fields of the social sciences and the humanities to explore representations of the body in literature and the arts across different times and cultures. The chapters analyse the social construction of the'ideal'body in terms of beauty, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class and disability, from a broadly psychoanalytic perspective, and traces the mechanisms which define the role of the physical appearance in the formation of identity and the assumption of social roles. Body Image and Identity in Contemporary Societies'unique interdisciplinary outlook aims to bridge the current gap between clinical observations and research in semiotic theory. It will be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, art therapists, art theorists, academics in the humanities and social sciences, and those interested in an interdisciplinary approach to the issues of body image and identity. Ekaterina Sukhanova is University Director of Academic Program Review at the City University of New York USA. She serves as Scientific Secretary of the Section for Art and Psychiatry and the Section of Art and Psychiatry of the World Psychiatric Association. She is also engaged in interdisciplinary research on cultural constructs of mental health and illness and curates exhibits of art brut as a vehicle for fighting stigma. Hans-Otto Thomashoff was born in Germany and lives in Vienna. He is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, art historian and author of fiction and non-fiction books. He has been curator of several art exhibitions highlighting the connection between the psyche and art as well as president of the section of Art and Psychiatry of the World Psychiatric Association and advisory committee member of the Sigmund Freud Foundation, Vienna.

Minding the Body: The Body in Psychoanalysis and Beyond outlines the value of a psychoanalytic approach to understanding the body and its vicissitudes and for addressing these in the context of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. The chapters cover a broad but esoteric range of subjects that are not often discussed within psychoanalysis such as the function of breast augmentation surgery, the psychic origins of hair, the use made of the analyst's toilet, transsexuality and the connection between dermatological conditions and necrophilic fantasies. The book also reaches ‘beyond the couch'to consider the nature of reality television makeover show. The book is based on the Alessandra Lemma's extensive clinical experience as a psychoanalyst and psychologist working in a range of public and private health care settings with patients for whom the body is the primary presenting problem or who have made unconscious use of the body to communicate their psychic pain. Minding the Body　draws on detailed clinical examples that vividly illustrate how the author approaches these clinical presentations in the consulting room and, as such, provides insights to the practicing clinician that will support their attempts at formulating patients'difficulties psychoanalytically and for how to helps such patients. It will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health workers, academics and literary readers interested in the body, sexuality and gender.

Let's be honest: most people are unhappy with at least some aspect of their physical appearance. Just think of all the money we spend each year trying to improve our looks! But if worrying about your appearance is getting in the way of living, maybe it's time to start thinking about body image in a completely new way. Based in proven-effective acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), Living with Your Body and Other Things You Hate offers a unique approach to addressing your struggle with body image. In this book, you will not be told that your self-perceptions are wrong, that your thoughts are irrational, or that your feelings are misguided. Instead, you will learn to live with the reality that these often painful thoughts and beliefs about yourself will arise from time to time, and that what is really important is accepting these distressing thoughts without allowing them to dominate your life. You know what it's like to constantly be checking the mirror, to avoid certain social situations where your body may be exposed, or to gaze longingly at a fashion model in a magazine and think, “Why can't I be her?” But what you may not know is that people who struggle with negative body image are at an increased risk for depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and low self-esteem. Body image problems can even lead to major financial issues. By focusing on your appearance and little else, you are hurting yourself in more ways than one. If you are ready to find a purpose in life that is more important than the pain you feel about your appearance, this book provides a truthful, powerful resource.

Beauty is often an invisible yet potent presence in clinical work. The Psychology of Beauty: Creation of a Beautiful Self, by Ellen Sinkman, LCSW, addresses the vital importance of beauty, its sources, and manifestations in everyone's lives—including psychotherapy patients. The ability to be mesmerizingly beautiful and beautifully creative, strivings toward mastering beauty, and wishes to be transformed are universal desires. During psychotherapy, patients manifest or defend against these forces. So it is striking that patients as well as therapists often overlook or dismiss issues about creating beauty in themselves.The book introduces this seeming contradiction with the ancient myth of Pygmalion and his sculpture of a beautiful woman. These enduring mythic figures represent the wish to emerge as a beautiful being and the wish for the power to create beauty in another. Patients in psychotherapy often pursue these elusive goals outside clinical work, rather than within treatment. Manifold venues enticingly promise reinvention. These activities may involve plastic surgery, beauty salon make-overs, diet gurus, elocution coaches, tattooing, and athletic training. Seekers of beauty engage with people whom they see as agents offering them ravishing physical or charismatic attractiveness. Psychotherapists may or may not be among agents seen as having the power to transform.The quest for beauty is widespread and in many instances non-pathological. Sinkman looks at multiple avenues of understanding and appreciation of efforts toward beauty, including artistic creativity and political activities. However there is a spectrum of investment in creating beauty. Pursuing beauty can become pathological. Therapists need to watch out for its appearance outside the psychoanalytic arena. Such material can be missed when the analyst falls into counter-transference difficulties such as feeling invested in transforming the patient, identifying with the patient's narcissistic injuries and/or needs to compete, or enacting battles with the patient. Such difficulties interfere with attunement to patients'experiences. The Psychology of Beauty considers definitions of beauty, gender identity themes, and origins of beauty in the mother-infant relationship. It investigates ugliness, sadomasochistic beauty pursuits, evolutionary factors, and aspects of aging. The book highlights emerging clinical material which has yet to gain notice and suggests what analysts may be missing, and why.

Body image is considered a multi-dimensional concept that includes perceptual, attitudinal, affective, and behavioral dimensions. The definition of body image is the mental picture we have in our minds of the size, shape and form of our bodies and our feelings concerning these characteristics and one's body parts. This book presents topical research data from across the globe in the study of body image, including understanding body image instability and distortion; body image and cancer patients; the advertising media and its contribution to body image problems and dysfunctional eating; alexithymia, body image and eating disorders; sociocultural influences on male body image; body image research in people of African descent; and body image measurement in exercise research, in women with physical disabilities, and in patients undergoing plastic surgery.

People with eating disorders often exhibit serious misconceptions about their own body image. Overcoming Body Image Disturbance provides a treatment programme (piloted by the authors) for people with eating disorders who have a negative body image. The manual offers advice for therapists, enabling them to deliver the programme, as well as practical guidance for the sufferer, encouraging them to learn the appropriate skills to change their attitude towards their body.Alongside the programme, this treatment manual provides: an introduction to the concept of body image and body image disturbance worksheets and homework assignments for the client recommendations of psychometric measures to aid assessment and evaluation coverage on innovative techniques and approaches such as mindfulness. This manual – intended to be used with close guidance from a therapist – will be essential for all therapists, mental health workers and counsellors working with clients who have negative body images.'Workbook resources can be downloaded free of charge by purchasers of the print version.'

Bodies in Treatment is a challenging volume that brings into conceptual focus an'unspoken dimension'of clinical work - the body and nonverbal communication - that has long occupied the shadowy realm of tacit knowledge. By bringing visceral, sensory, and imagistic modes of emotional processing to the forefront, Editor Frances Sommer Anderson and the contributors to this original collection expand the domain of psychodynamic engagement. Working at the leading edge of psychoanalytic theory and practice, and in the forefront of the integrative psychotherapy movement, Anderson has created a collaborative project that stimulates interdisciplinary dialogue on the developmental neurobiology of attachment, the micro-processing of interchanges between the infant and caregiver, the neuroscience of emotional processing and trauma, body-focused talking treatments for trauma, and research in cognitive science. Enlightened by experiencing body-based treatments for thirty years, Anderson reflects on the powerful impact of these interventions, recounting attempts to integrate her somatically-informed discoveries into the'talking'frame. Reaching further, her contributors present richly informative accounts of how experiences in body-based modalities can be creatively integrated into a psychoanalytic framework of treatment. Readers are introduced to specialized modalities, such as craniosacral therapy and polarity therapy, as well as to the adjunctive use of yoga, the effectiveness of which can be grounded neurophysiologically. Somatic interventions are discussed in terms of the extent to which they can promote depth-psychological change outside the psychoanalytic consulting room as well as how they can enrich the relational process in psychodynamic treatment. The final sections of Bodies in Treatment explore the range of ways in which patients'and therapists'bodies engage, sustain, and contain the dynamics of treatment.

The Female Body in Mind introduces new ways of thinking about issues of women's mental health assessment and treatment. Its multidisciplinary approach incorporates social, psychological, biological and philosophical perspectives on the female body. The contributions, from notable academics in the field of women's mental health, examine the relationship between women's bodies, society and culture, demonstrating how the body has become a platform for women's expression of their distress and anguish. The book is divided into six sections, all centred on the theme of the body, covering: The body at risk. The hurting body. The reproductive body. The interactive body. Body-sensitive therapies. The body on my mind. All professionals involved in women's mental health will welcome this exploration of the complexities involved in the relationship between women bodies and their mental health.

In this powerful guide, Kingsbury and Williams equip readers with simple reflections, vignettes, and everyday analogies that they have successfully used with their own clients to counter destructive feelings and shatter distorted ideas of food and weight. Pithy and positive statements replace compulsive, perfectionist rules with new strategies to cope with blame, guilt, vulnerability, and self-criticism.Concrete activities help people with eating problems get off the scales, get in touch with their feelings, and make friends with their bodies.Written by experienced therapists who understand the needs and fears of people with eating problems, the book is a refreshing guide to lasting change and recovery.

The Embodied Female is the first volume of this series for the Committee on Women and Psychoanalysis of the International Psychoanalytical Association. This book brings together highly original and insightful contributions from an international group of renowned psychoanalaysts.

David W. Krueger illustrates a novel synthesis of fundamental psychodynamic principles with evolving advances in developmental, self, neuropsychological, and attachment theories. Focusing on action symptoms, self object experiences, gender issues, embodiment, somatic symptoms, affect regulation, and ego states, the theoretical innovations are illustrated by vivid case material. He introduces treatment inroads enabling clinicians to hear and articulate arcane messages spoken in metaphor, actualized in symptoms, and encrypted in the body. A fresh conceptualization from an original thinker, Integrating Body Self and Psychological Self broadens our understanding of the mind and body interplay in the clinical exchange.

Despite the gains of the women's movement, women are still judged by what they look like--and men, by what they do. Fat--A Fate Worse Than Death? offers hardy resistance to the narrow, random, and irrational appearance standards set for American women through an approach that is personal, eclectic, courageous, and funny. If you are interested in giving up your diet, throwing out your scales, and concentrating on who you are on a deeper level, this book will show you how to accept, appreciate, and even love your body!Using statistics, research, anecdotes, and personal experiences, Fat--A Fate Worse Than Death? explores how appearance standards have built a prison for women. With the book's helpful advice, reading suggestions, and list of more than 100 ways to fight looksism, sexism, ageism, and racism, you will learn to express your rights and needs, regardless of your shape or size, and tear down those prison walls. Designed to transcend the boundaries between the personal and the political, Fat--A Fate Worse Than Death? discusses: examples of how weight and size constitute the last socially accepted prejudice the national “War on Fat” counteracting societal influences that support weight preoccupation connection between appearance standards for older women and large women nurturing your body resisting male-defined standards of beauty for women the myth of diets and dieting how the body resists weight loss how women are disempowered by concentration on weight and appearance how concentrating on appearance leaves real-life issues unaddressed how feeling bad about yourself can turn you into a willing consumerFeminists, faculty and students of women's studies programs, aging women, women of radical politics, and other concerned women and men will find that Fat--A Fate Worse Than Death? states explicitly how women are kept powerless by subscribing to cultural and social edicts on physical appearance. Don't live silently in a society that degrades and discounts women because of their physical stature and don‘t let obsession with thinness keep you passive, docile, and unable to give your energy to things that really need your passion and intelligence. Read this book and learn to not only value yourself for who you are, but also to counteract American culture's equality-denying prejudices and practices.