[Melbadaze]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009...-adam-phillips

[pachyderm]

"Nothing makes us more disapproving, disgusted, punitive - not to mention fascinated, exhilarated and amazed - than other people's extravagant appetite for food, or alcohol, or money, or drugs, or violence; nothing makes us more frightened, more furious, more despairing than other people's extreme commitment to political ideals or religious beliefs."

Sigh. I wasn't fascinated enough with this article to go any further with it...

[Melbadaze]

Never mind patchy....it interested me...but then again I can find interest in lots of things..... glad you spelt article better than I?

[pachyderm]

Just me teasing, Melba...

[Melbadaze]

yes, I see thats where your most comfortable.

[ECHOES]

M, I love this article. The limits of excess, the wishes behind greed.

Why, if we wanted something, if we loved something - a mother, a cream-cake - why would we want too much of it? Well, we might fear losing it, never having it again, so we might believe that we need to take it all, and hoard it for ever - that because it could go away, or run out, or someone else could take it, we had better get as much as we can. Or we might become greedy because what we are getting is not quite what we want - it's failing to satisfy me so I begin to believe that more is better, that if one cream cake isn't doing the trick, three will, when in fact it isn't a cream cake that I really want. Or I might become greedy out of envy; I realise that the cakes and the mother that I love don't actually belong to me, that I depend on them being available; because I can't bear the fact that I depend on them I would rather destroy them with my greed. There is always a magical belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our need for it. And finally, greed is a way of avoiding making choices; if I have everything I don't have to choose what I want. And choosing what I want means giving up some pleasures for other pleasures.
When we are greedy, the psychoanalyst Harold Boris writes, we are in a state of mind in which we "wish and hope to have everything all the time"; greed "wants everything, nothing less will do", and so "it cannot be satisfied". Appetite, he writes in a useful distinction, is inherently satisfiable. So the excess of appetite we call greed is actually a form of despair. Greed turns up when we lose faith in our appetites, when what we need is not available. In this view it is not that appetite is excessive; it is that our fear of frustration is excessive. Excess is a sign of frustration; we are only excessive wherever there is a frustration we are unaware of, and a fear we cannot bear.

.. and further in the article...

What we learn then, from the road of excess, is about our frustration, and about how difficult it can be for us to locate what it is that we do need. Excess is always linked to some kind of deprivation. So it may not be certain kinds of excessive behaviour we hate, whether we express this as a terror of our children becoming anorexic, or a prejudice against fat people, or disgust that there are celebrity chefs in a world of starving people - it may be that we hate excessive behaviour because it reminds us of our own and other people's deprivations. Perhaps the bad news that greed brings us is not that we are insatiable animals that need to control themselves, but that we are frustrated animals who can't easily identify what we need, and who are terrified of the experience of frustration.

This is just the kind of 'exploring beneath the surface' that I find so fascinating in therapy. Thank you for posting this!

[ECHOES]

As Anna Freud once famously said, in our dreams we can have our eggs cooked exactly how we want them, but we can't eat them

This is so funny. T and I talk about fantasy. I will have to remember this. And, I will add that the frustration and pain from not being able to eat those eggs can be immense!

[deliquesce]

i actually got a bit confused/upset at the beginning when the author mentioned "so called" eating disorders. i gave up reading after that (i dont like "so called" anythings, especially mental disorders) but if anyone knows if he clarified it later on, could you let me know?

i tried to skim read the rest, but it's quite a long article!!