Breakfast Reading

So, I'm reading along in Prof. Boice's book as I eat my strawberries and roast beef and ham and drink my beef broth and tea with half-and-half for breakfast, and here he starts talking about how strange it is that there are so few therapists actually working on understanding what we call writer's block when there are hundreds and hundreds of therapists for other anxieties and phobias.

Why [he asks] do writing blocks remain largely untreated?  Why are most accounts of blocking and its treatment amateurish and less than credible?  Where else can we find similarly unimpressive results?  The answer to the last question is easy and illuminating--in traditional programs for weight loss in obese people.  Put simply, dieting generally leads to failed plans and even greater weight gains in the long run.  The reasons for this expensive failure are becoming more and more apparent.  For one thing, diets typically rely on external forcing.  For another, weight loss programs ignore the problematic patterns behind diet failures, particularly binge eating.  They even, as a rule, overlook the deficits that dieters suffer in areas such as relaxation, self-focus, and self-esteem.†

If this keeps up, I'm going to feel downright spooked.  And I thought that my experience of finding the proper diet at the same time that I started actively working on my writing block was just my usual medievalist-prone tendency to see analogies in everything.

†Robert Boice, How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency: A Psychological Adventure (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), p. 114.