Psychoanalysis for the Modern World.
Educating psychoanalysts to help people become the best versions of themselves.
PANY Updates.
Twentieth C. Philip Wilson, MD Memorial Lecture
This memorial lectureship honors a psychoanalyst who pioneered the psychoanalytic treatment of anorexia nervosa, bulimia, and other eating and psychosomatic disorders, Charles Philip Wilson, who died in 1999 at age 79.
Having majored in English at Yale University, where he developed an interest in Freudian views of literature, he matriculated at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University during America’s entrance into the Second World War. After graduating, he served as medical officer aboard a transport ship in the Pacific and began to recognize the body’s exquisite sensitivity to powerful but unseen emotional currents as enlisted men flocked to the sick bay with gastrointestinal complaints at times of stress. As Chief Medical Resident at the Naval Hospital in Oakland, California he was impressed by the frequency of colitis diagnosed in former prisoners of war. He pursued his interest further while a Resident in Psychiatry at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital and at the Psychoanalytic Training center of Columbia University, where he was exposed to the psychoanalytic work of George Daniels, M.D. on ulcerative colitis. Inspired by the bold approaches of his mentor Melitta Sperling, M.D., he developed his own technique for the psychoanalytic treatment of colitis and, soon after, of anorexia nervosa, which was previously considered rare. Such cases became the mainstay of his private practice and his attending appointment at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York City.
The technique he developed emphasized the earliest phases of childhood development and the importance of mother-infant interaction in an era when academic psychoanalysis focused primarily on the Oedipus complex typical of later in childhood. Instead of unconscious sexually competitive conflicts, oral fears and struggles referrable to infancy became his target for analytic attention in patients with symptoms of bulimia, overeating, or anorexia nervosa. He also emphasized how eating disordered patients form their symptoms in family and wider societal contexts that place unrealistic and sometimes exploitive demands on their bodily appearances.
Wilson contributed extensively to the teaching of such principles for decades, having formed and served as moderator of the Psychosomatic Study Group of the American Psychoanalytic Association as well as a similar group at PANY. The group continued long after Wilson’s death to focus on analytic approaches to psychosomatic illnesses. With academic appointments at both Columbia University and the State University of New York at Downstate Medical Center, he published over thirty works in professional periodicals, authored or co-authored nineteen book chapters, and edited or co-edited three published texts, one of which, The Fear of Being Fat (Jason Aronson, New York, 1985) was a standard text in the field of treating anorexia nervosa. In 1991 he received the Sigmund Freud Award of the American Society of Psychoanalytic Physicians for his distinguished service to psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Most importantly, he was a beloved teacher, supervisor, and colleague, having mentored many who went on to focus their psychoanalytic attention on the inseparable nature of mind and body in their patients.
Psychoanalytic Association of New York
NYU Department of Psychiatry
One Park Avenue, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10016