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Obesity and psychoanalysis

Published Online:https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.135.5.547

Seventy-two psychoanalysts collected information on 84 obese patients and on a control sample of 63 of their patients of normal weight. Despite the fact that obesity was the chief complaint of only 6% of the obese patients, weight losses at 42 months of psychoanalytic treatment compared favorably with those after traditional medical efforts: 47% of the obese psychoanalytic patients lost more than 9 kg, and 19% lost more than 18 kg. There was also a striking decrease in the percentage of obese patients suffering from body image disparagement--from 44% to 12%, an unexpectedly good result for this chronic and intractable disorder.

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