Tom Wooldridge
Biographic Data
| ID | 4494284 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tom Wooldridge |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tom |
| FAMILY NAME | Wooldridge |
| SIGNATURE | WOOLDRIDGE T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Golden Gate University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2137-2121 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Filling the emptiness
Deception in Anorexia Nervosa
As Williams (1997) describes, patients with anorexia nervosa have been on the receiving end of intrusive maternal projections and consequently develop a no-entry system of defense. This paper explores how deception may function as an aspect of this system in two ways. First, deception may serve as a self-preservative effort to evade emotional contact with the maternal object, which is experienced as overflowing with projections, and to attenuate …
How His Hair is Growing Thin!”
Hair is a powerful symbol of individual and group identity: physical and therefore personal yet public rather than private. Despite the fact that male pattern hair loss causes men considerable emotional distress, its unconscious emotional significance is almost entirely unrepresented in the psychoanalytic literature, with a few notable exceptions. After a review of the sociological literature on male pattern hair loss and the relatively sparse ps…
Anorexia Nervosa, Psychic Death, and the Subjugation of Need
The entropic body is a body-state that develops against a background of early trauma in which the environment has failed to regulate the child’s anxiety, leaving her unable to regulate her own anxiety or to turn to others for help in doing so. The term refers to Freud’s conception of the death drive as aiming toward a state of tension reduction. In this paper, I describe how the anorexic patient’s subjugation of need aims at the phenomenological …
Binge eating disorder
Eating Disorders
Alexithymia, Meaning-Making, and Management
In response to Novack’s (this issue) insightful paper, this discussion endeavors to extend her arguments with my own thinking about alexithymia in patients with eating disorders and the fundamental role of the psychoanalyst in promoting the patient’s capacity for the psychic elaboration of emotion as he or she moves through the treatment process and engages with the larger treatment team. While the necessity of the analyst engaging in the concret…
Abjection , Traumatic Themes , and Alexithymia in Anorexia Nervosa
Patients with anorexia nervosa frequently describe feeling that their bodies, or parts of their bodies, are disgusting, ugly, gross, or “fat.” In this article, I develop an understanding of these feelings, using Kristeva’s notion of abjection, which highlights an aspect of the subjective experience of anorexic patients. This can be accounted for by two traumatic themes, i.e., aspects of the mother-child narcissistic object relation often observed…
The Paternal Function in Anorexia Nervosa
The role of the father, both flesh-and-blood and symbolic, is explored in a subset of families of patients with anorexia nervosa. In these families the mother’s narcissistic investment in her child makes separation-individuation difficult. A factor potentially influencing whether the child goes on to develop anorexia nervosa is the strength of the paternal function, which optimally helps the child learn how to appropriately deploy his aggression …
Finding Freedom
After an overview of the opposed concepts of freedom and psychic determinism, and of the compatibilist reconciliation between the two that is most appropriate for psychoanalysis, the importance of agency as a psychoanalytic idea is considered. In particular, two ways in which the term agency may be used are examined: agency as fact and agency as experience . The former refers to the degree of relative freedom an individual possesses from “inner” …
Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders
The Paternal Function in Anorexia Nervosa
The role of the father, both flesh-and-blood and symbolic, is explored in a subset of families of patients with anorexia nervosa. In these families the mother’s narcissistic investment in her child makes separation-individuation difficult. A factor potentially influencing whether the child goes on to develop anorexia nervosa is the strength of the paternal function, which optimally helps the child learn how to appropriately deploy his aggression …
Finding Freedom
After an overview of the opposed concepts of freedom and psychic determinism, and of the compatibilist reconciliation between the two that is most appropriate for psychoanalysis, the importance of agency as a psychoanalytic idea is considered. In particular, two ways in which the term agency may be used are examined: agency as fact and agency as experience . The former refers to the degree of relative freedom an individual possesses from “inner” …
Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders
Alexithymia, Meaning-Making, and Management
In response to Novack’s (this issue) insightful paper, this discussion endeavors to extend her arguments with my own thinking about alexithymia in patients with eating disorders and the fundamental role of the psychoanalyst in promoting the patient’s capacity for the psychic elaboration of emotion as he or she moves through the treatment process and engages with the larger treatment team. While the necessity of the analyst engaging in the concret…
Abjection , Traumatic Themes , and Alexithymia in Anorexia Nervosa
Patients with anorexia nervosa frequently describe feeling that their bodies, or parts of their bodies, are disgusting, ugly, gross, or “fat.” In this article, I develop an understanding of these feelings, using Kristeva’s notion of abjection, which highlights an aspect of the subjective experience of anorexic patients. This can be accounted for by two traumatic themes, i.e., aspects of the mother-child narcissistic object relation often observed…
The Paternal Function in Anorexia Nervosa
The role of the father, both flesh-and-blood and symbolic, is explored in a subset of families of patients with anorexia nervosa. In these families the mother’s narcissistic investment in her child makes separation-individuation difficult. A factor potentially influencing whether the child goes on to develop anorexia nervosa is the strength of the paternal function, which optimally helps the child learn how to appropriately deploy his aggression …
Anorexia Nervosa, Psychic Death, and the Subjugation of Need
The entropic body is a body-state that develops against a background of early trauma in which the environment has failed to regulate the child’s anxiety, leaving her unable to regulate her own anxiety or to turn to others for help in doing so. The term refers to Freud’s conception of the death drive as aiming toward a state of tension reduction. In this paper, I describe how the anorexic patient’s subjugation of need aims at the phenomenological …
Binge eating disorder
Eating Disorders
Deception in Anorexia Nervosa
As Williams (1997) describes, patients with anorexia nervosa have been on the receiving end of intrusive maternal projections and consequently develop a no-entry system of defense. This paper explores how deception may function as an aspect of this system in two ways. First, deception may serve as a self-preservative effort to evade emotional contact with the maternal object, which is experienced as overflowing with projections, and to attenuate …
How His Hair is Growing Thin!”
Hair is a powerful symbol of individual and group identity: physical and therefore personal yet public rather than private. Despite the fact that male pattern hair loss causes men considerable emotional distress, its unconscious emotional significance is almost entirely unrepresented in the psychoanalytic literature, with a few notable exceptions. After a review of the sociological literature on male pattern hair loss and the relatively sparse ps…
Filling the emptiness
Psychology (9 works) · Eating disorders (7 works) · Psychoanalysis (7 works) · Psychotherapist (7 works) · Social Psychology (6 works) · Developmental psychology (5 works) · Medicine (5 works) · Psychoanalytic theory (5 works) · Anorexia nervosa (4 works) · Clinical Psychology (4 works)