Treating patients "who don't speak": The challenge of treating children with eating disorders in a residential facility in Italy

Eating disorder treatment assumes that patients have an internal world that they can explore and talk about with their therapists – and that the aim, besides restoring weight, is to make patients ‘responsible’ and ‘autonomous’. Drawing on fieldwork in an Italian residential facility, this chapter shows that treating ‘preadolescents’ – a recent and increasingly prevalent phenomenon – puts into question the treatment paradigm because children fail to take the steps deemed essential for psychotherapeutic transformation: they do not become ‘aware’ of needing help, do not reach the point when they want to recover, and cannot become ‘autonomous’. This forces professionals (and anthropologists) to rethink treatment practices.