This chapter focuses on an interpersonal/relational psychodynamic approach to working with eating disorders (EDs), which illuminates the links between symptom and meaning, action and words, isolation and relatedness. The work of any treatment of EDs is an ongoing, complicated mixture of direct intervention with the symptom and exploration of what the intervention means to the patient, including the role the symptom plays in the patient’s intrapsychic and interpersonal world. Understanding this as it unfolds relationally allows the intersubjective experience of both patient and therapist to collide, mingle, and ultimately coexist. Thinking about working with patients with EDs from this vantage point means that the experience of conflict is a therapeutic gain, not obstacle. Multiplicity and the capacity for dissociation are seen as part of the manifestations of what happens with patients with EDs.

This chapter briefly discusses the interaction of trauma, attachment injury, and dissociation in treating eating disorders (EDs). What is it that causes some people to develop an ED, and others to manage eating behaviors in a relatively normal manner? The answer is anything but simple. EDs are a biopsychosocial illness. They are the result of a complex interplay of factors including genes, temperament, social interactions, early attachment, culture, and of course life experiences. These variables come together and affect each other in a perfect storm fashion and may result in ED psychopathology. The cycle of being flooded with early, unprocessed trauma upon remittance of ED symptoms, followed by relapse, reduces the foundation of treatment to shifting sand. Unless the trauma and the ED are treated simultaneously, treatment becomes futile at best: fraught with multiple relapses, behavioral substitutions, feelings of hopelessness, and premature termination.