Susie Orbach
Susie Orbach
Susie Orbachis a British psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and social critic. Her first book, Fat is a Feminist Issue, analysed the psychology of dieting and over-eating in women, and she has campaigned against media pressure on girls to feel dissatisfied with their physical appearance. She is married to the author Jeanette Winterson...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPsychologist
pain culture celebrity-culture
Celebrity culture is something that pains me.
issues feminist disease
Fat is a social disease, and fat is a feminist issue.
trying needs consumers
Consumer society tantalises us. We then try within ourselves to control the needs that are being constantly stimulated.
perfect becoming body
Bodies are becoming our personal mission to tame, extend and perfect.
pregnancy play wanted
A wanted pregnancy as much as a dreaded pregnancy can play differently than all one's previous imaginings.
food want thinness
We know that ever woman wants to be thin. Our images of womanhood are almost synonymous with thinness.
way kind analysts
The analyst's psyche operates as a kind of... something to hold on to while somebody's going through therapy, if they're deconstructing their own psyche, if that's cracking up in some way, or dissolving.
space use want
Public intellectuals come from a range of areas and use their expertise to comment more widely than just their field. They want to make a contribution to public space, and they stick their necks out to do it.
insecure ideas people
Our idea of a healthy body is so destabilised that insecure people have come to bolster their own bodies by deeming others - those with fat bodies - less worthy, less capable and less employable.
hair ubiquity faces
Not that it was Twiggy's fault, but the ubiquity of her image created a sense in young women that to be stylish meant to be skinny, flat-chested with an ingenue face and straight hair.
views perspective political
Being able to provoke a different point of view to the standard current ideological or political perspective as played out in conventional newspaper or radio reportage is what a public intellectual does. But it's not merely about being oppositional, because that's too negative.
therapists
There is no such thing as a neutral therapist.
political body fit
The insistence that the commercialisation of the body is a fit subject for political discussion and intervention is well overdue.
kitchen wish needs
I wish we could treat our bodies as the place we live from, rather than regard it as a place to be worked on, as though it were a disagreeable old kitchen in need of renovation and update.