Eating Disorders - fieldi

104 Jodie’s Story
Toward the end, Jodie began leaving long messages on my
answering machine. They did not require a response. Once I picked
up the phone and she would not speak to me directly, only to the
machine. She took to calling after midnight to avoid any danger of
interruption or interaction. After several months of exploration and
interpretation, I decided to use more active management. Now I
said, “This must stop. You are giving everything away, and you will
always remain innocent of experience. Hold on to it. Write it down.
Learn from it. Don’t purge it.”
Jodie told me that when she was ten years old, she passed by her
parents’ bedroom and saw them having sex. She ran to the bathroom,
crying. Her mother came after her. (I was reminded of the
two masses of her dream separating.) Her mother warned her never
to tell anyone what she had seen. (Purge it.) She still wondered why.
But she had remained innocent of the wish to be sexually attractive
and compete with her mother.
After my interpreting her excessive use of my answering machine,
she felt injured. She told me, paradoxically, that this was the first
meaningful statement I had made. Nevertheless she was leaving
because she could not wait two years for the next bit of help. I commented,
“I give you something good and then you leave.” She stayed
for a while. She bravely brought herself to sessions week after week
until my summer vacation. At that last session she talked about feeling
depressed. I suggested our upcoming separation as a cause. “Do
all therapists have such big egos?” she asked. “Well, maybe it’s just
human to want to be important,” she added. “For you, too?” I said.
Jodie responded, “Yeah. I suppose so.” “So, we want to be important
to each other.” She cried. It was a new sound, strange and clotted.
Jodie hasn’t returned. The poignancy of bulimia is the search for
solace that fails because, once found, the solace must be repudiated,
like the food taken in as good, turns bad, and must be purged. She
left a message on my machine telling me that she had no money and
would not be coming back. She said, “It’s been fun.” It was never fun.
I must content myself with having been around for only part of the
work. Maybe the groundwork has been laid for the next phase.
Perhaps an aborted treatment was foreshadowed in the early
dream material. Two masses separating represent her two sets of
feelings about herself: the good baby and the kidneys that carry the