The Obsession is a deeply committed and beautifully written analysis of our society's increasing demand that women be thin. It offers a careful, thought provoking discussion of the reasons men have encouraged this obsession and women have embraced it. It is a book about women's efforts to become thin rather than to accept the natural dimensions of their bodies--a book about the meaning of food and its rejection.

Answers the need for help among the five million American women who suffer from eating disorders. "An inspired psychoanalytic meditation on contemporary female identity and eating disorders."--Phyllis Chesler

In her new book, Kim Chernin, author of The Obsession and The Hungry Self, takes us inside the mind of the psychoanalytic listener and her clients as few other writers have done. In an almost novelistic fasion she recalls her analysis with three very different analysts and how they shaped her analytic work with their distinctive personalities. She decides to go back to graduate school for a degree in clinical psychology and works with a major figure in the field, discussing with him the life stories of her own clients.