THE OVEREATERS: Eating Styles and Personality

by ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1979

What has been done elsewhere in moderation with moderate success (see Eda LeShan's Winning the Losing Battle, above) is here carried to compulsive excess; thus, instead of LeShan's simple linkages--overeating occasionally to bring back mother, occasionally to simulate pregnancy, etc.--we have strongly delineated psychoanalytical caricatures: ""The Frightened Overeater: The Oral Cluster,"" ""The Sexual Overeater: The Genital Cluster,"" and so on. The idea is that one's cluster, or ""group of related problems,"" stems from the particular stage at which one's emotional development was arrested. Mired in cases that are sometimes bizarre, but almost always as extreme as the framework the authors have provided, the book can do little but alienate. It may provide easy categories, but categories aren't solutions, and even the ""treatments"" suggested here are unconvincing: nurturing, motherlike psychologists for patients in the oral cluster, ""expressive therapies"" for the pent-up anger of the anal cluster. Freud and Erikson in shorthand, but the reader is left wanting.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Human Sciences Press--dist. by Independent Pub. Group

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979

Categories: NONFICTION