“Ghosts at the banquet” - Scholarly Commons Home

Winnicott note the collaborative process for potential space where the therapist
is a “good enough”, vitalising object for the client.
Attraction and Repulsion to Life: Self Psychology
The self-psychological understanding is related specifically to the issue of the
client’s rejection of life and the anorexic person feeling and behaving as a
selfless human being who serves the needs of others (Bachar, 2002). The
therapeutic issue is how to regrow a basic sense of self (Guntrip, 1969) or how
to integrate and differentiate a stable consistent self–representation (Kernberg,
1976). According to this ‘selfless’ theory, the client is liable to feel self-guilt
(Goodsitt, 1997) whenever she promotes her own interests. It was by using
Orbach & Florian’s (1991) instrument of ‘attraction to life or attraction to
death’, and their own Selflessness Scale that Bachar et al. (2002) concluded
that clinicians should not focus directly on death preoccupation. Rather they
should try to reduce the client’s self-guilt or guilt at promoting self-interests.
This appears to be in line with therapeutic techniques recommended by Bruch
(1975) for treating clients: to develop a sense of competence through a self
respecting identity. Bruch and self psychologist Tolpin (1980) acknowledge
that the connecting of bodily experience is at the essence of one’s
psychological being; leading to a self experienced through a sense of
wholeness and aliveness through ‘time and space’. This is important to the
theory of self psychology, with the human caretaking environment providing
calming and sustaining functions so that external provision fosters an internal
psychic structure of the self (Geist, 1989). Geist, like Winnicott (1971),
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