Compulsive Eating & GLP-1 Weight Loss Drugs
CPD Credits
3.5
Event Type
Live Online Event
Location
Zoom & Partially Recorded
Time (UK)
2:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Standard
£80.00
Trainee/NHS
£68.00
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Compulsive Eating & GLP-1 Weight Loss Drugs
Friday, June 12, 2026

Compulsive Eating & GLP-1 Weight Loss Drugs

Appetite, control, longing, and desire in the consulting room

With Susie Orbach, Jean Petrucelli & Tom Wooldridge

Working with patients using the new injectable weight loss drugs such as Ozempic, Mounjaro, and Wegovy is new, unchartered territory. Heralded as revolutionary offering effortless answers to appetite, desire, and the unruly hungers that have long troubled so many, these medications raise profound questions for clinical practice. How will such a powerful disruptor alter clinical work with patients who struggle with eating disorders and in particular compulsive eating?

As Winnicott might observe, appetite is not merely biological but relational, it speaks of the earliest dialogue between baby and caregiver, between needing and being met. When hunger is silenced, the psyche may lose one of its most vital forms of communication. These drugs risk bypassing that conversation, replacing spontaneous experience with managed control, a “false self” solution to the difficulty of being in one’s own body. For decades, consulting rooms have been filled with people struggling to live within bodies that feel uninhabitable, burdened by cultural demands for thinness and mastery. GLP-1s may perpetuate this estrangement, challenging the task of learning to live from one’s body rather than managing it.

Through these talks, we will explore what it means when technology promises to correct the body without engaging the emotional conflicts it expresses. How do we work with patients whose relationships to hunger, pleasure, and need are being reprogrammed at the biochemical level? And what becomes of the therapist’s task ?

Join Susie Orbach, Jean Petrucelli (not recorded), and Tom Wooldridge for an engaging and thought-provoking online conference.

Programme

14.00 Introductions

14.05 Susie Orbach 
Eating and Body Issues in a Time of Ozempic 
Troubled bodies and troubled eating have marked an increasing majority of people over the last several decades. New pharmaceutical preparations extol the efficacy of OZEMPIC, MOUNJARO, WEGOVY as THE solution. Such medications aim to bypass prompts of hunger. They render satiety speedily causing discomfort if a person eats more than a little. In so doing, they mask issues of longing, of desire, of wanting, of hungers as well as the fear of needs which need to be seen and borne. How are clinicians, whose focus has been on addressing conflicted needs, dealing with this new technology that is now inside the consulting room? These disrupter drugs can cause interpersonal difficulties. They raise moral questions. They are reshaping of psychic defences. This workshop will draw on clinical cases and new theory on the body to underpin therapists work in this changing climate.

14.45 Q&A with all speakers

15.00 Tom Wooldridge 
Control, Appetite, and the GLP-1 Era
In psychoanalytic thinking, control is more than an adaptive capacity but also a psychological imperative organised around predictability, agency over internal states, narrative coherence, bodily experience, and distance from intolerable affect. The body, it's shape and appetites, is a central arena where these conflicts play out. GLP-1 medications offer a powerful new way to regulate appetite and weight, potentially relieving compulsive eating and restoring a sense of agency. Yet this seeming mastery creates new dilemmas: limits that before required adaptation and mourning now appear surmountable, potentially unsettling a psychic balance built around those limits. The realisation of the ideal body or appetite may paradoxically evoke what was feared, exposure, envy, identity loss, undermining the feeling of control the (often driven) pursuit was consciously intended to secure. Situated within a cultural economy that monetizes bodily distress and sells the “lean dream” as a purchasable solution, GLP-1s present urgent questions about control, surrender, and the meaning of desire. This talk will discuss how clinicians can help patients reflect upon these dilemmas without bypassing mourning and while sustaining narrative coherence and remaining open to the underlying vulnerabilities that powerful tools of control may expose.

15.45 Q&A with all speakers
16.00 Break

16.15 Jean Petrucelli 
The Body in a Changing World: What’s Appetite Got to do with It? (Not Recorded)
Appetite has gone haywire. In the past two years with the rise in use of semaglutide injections originally created for diabetes and now used for weight loss, the landscape of bodies and one’s relationship to food has been turned topsy turvy. While heralded as a game changer, GLP-1 medications have their pros and cons, both of which need to be carefully considered. For some, this can be a tool in working with the despair and intransigence in treating obesity, yet it’s so controversial because of the way it works; by triggering a chemical repugnance to food and appetite itself. Is it a clockwork orange for junk food, an eating disorder in an injection? It remains the case that the challenge of learning to live from one’s body, rather than managing one’s body, and the ongoing need to accept health at various sizes is still of crucial importance. The future of the body landscape is daunting, and many challenges remain.

Please note this session is not recorded.

17.00 Q&A with all speakers
17.30 End

Susie Orbach

Susie Orbach is a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and co-founder of The Women’s Therapy Centre in London (1976) and The WTCI in New York (1981). She is the author of many books. Her most recent In Therapy: The Unfolding Story is an expanded edition of In Therapy (an annotated version of the BBC series listened to live by 2 million people). Her first book Fat is a Feminist Issue has been continuously in print since 1978. Bodies (which won the APA Psychology of Women’s Book Prize in 2009) was updated in 2019. She is the recipient of the Inaugural British Psychoanalytic Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 2019.  She continues to help many individuals and couples from her practice in London. 

Tom Wooldridge

Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, ABPP, FIPA, CEDS-C is Chair in the Department of Psychology at Golden Gate University as well as a psychoanalyst and board-certified, licensed psychologist. His books include, Understanding Anorexia Nervosa in Males, Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders: When Words Fail and Bodies Speak (Relational Perspectives Book Series), Eating Disorders (New Introductions to Contemporary Psychoanalysis), and the co-edited volume, Advancing Psychotherapy for the Next Generation: Rehumanizing Mental Health Policy and Practice. He has also written a novel about the process of psychotherapy, Ghosts of the Unremembered Past, additionally released as an audiobook with Audible. His newest book, Parenting in Eating Disorder Recovery: Attunement, Reflection, and the Art of Staying Present, will be released by Guilford in 2026. He is a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute for Northern California and a Training Analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He is on the Scientific Advisory Council of the National Eating Disorders Association, Faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology (NCSPP), the William Alanson White Institute’s Eating Disorders, Compulsions, and Addictions program, and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and has a private practice in Berkeley, CA and via tele-health.

Jean Petrucelli

Jean Petrucelli, Ph.D., CEDS-S, is Faculty, Training & Supervising Analyst, Director and Co-Founder of the Eating Disorders, Compulsions and Addictions Service (EDCAS); Conference Advisory Board (CAB) Committee Chair; and Founding Director of the EDCAS one-year educational certificate program at The William Alanson White Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is an Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology and Clinical Consultant for New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Associate Editor for Contemporary Psychoanalysis; Editor of six books: including winner of the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis 2016 Edited Book, Body-States: Interpersonal and Relational Perspectives on the Treatment of Eating Disorders. Dr. Petrucelli specializes in the interpersonal treatment of eating disorders and addictions, presents nationally and internationally, and is in private practice in NYC. [email protected]

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