Free zoom event with Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, ABPP, FIPA, CEDS-S : Psychoanalytic thinking offers valuable insights to clinicians working with eating disorders and body image concerns. In a field that increasingly emphasizes rapid symptom reduction, treatment providers risk neglecting less overt, and less easily measurable, aspects of the patient’s experience. This presentation will bring together some of the latest thinking about how a psychoanalytic approach can help us to understand the emotional experience of an eating disorder more deeply. As a member of a larger treatment team, the psychoanalyst assists the patient in contending with an internal landscape marked by isolation and loneliness as well as shame, guilt, and embarrassment, not to mention a profound hopelessness about the possibilities of emotional connection. We will discuss the role of the psychoanalytic thinking within a broader therapeutic approach focus on concepts such as no-entry defenses, alexithymia and disruptions in symbolic functioning, autistic-contiguous uses of the body, and self- and body-states.