Susie Orbach

Early life

Orbach was born in London in 1946 into a Jewish family, and was brought up in Chalk Farm, north London. Her mother was an American teacher, and her father the British Labour MP Maurice Orbach. She won a scholarship to North London Collegiate School, and attended until she was 15.

Career

With Luise Eichenbaum, Orbach created the Women's Therapy Centre in 1976 and the Women's Therapy Centre Institute, a training institute in New York, in 1981. She has been a consultant for The World Bank, the NHS and Unilever and was co-originator of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty.

Susie is also a member of the steering group for the Campaign for Body Confidence, co-founded by Lynne Featherstone and Jo Swinson in March 2010.

Scholarship

Orbach has been a Visiting Scholar at the New School for Social Research in New York and was Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics for ten years. She was chair of the Relational School in the UK. Orbach is a convener of Anybody, an organisation that campaigns for body diversity. She is a co-founder and board member of Antidote, which works for emotional literacy. Orbach is also a co-founder of Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility. She lectures and broadcasts extensively world-wide and has been profiled in numerous newspapers, such as The Guardian.

Practice

Orbach has a clinical practice and sees both individuals and couples in London.

Family

Orbach's relationship with Joseph Schwartz, the father of her two children, ended after more than 30 years.

According to writer Jeanette Winterson, now her wife, Orbach "calls herself post-heterosexual".

Publications

Orbach's first book, Fat is a Feminist Issue, brought the problems of women's relationships to their bodies and their eating to public consciousness. In this book she looked at the unconscious meanings of fat and thin and why people eat when they aren't physically hungry. She also developed ways to overcome compulsive eating. Her other books addressing food and the body are Fat is a Feminist Issue II, Hunger Strike, On Eating and her latest book Bodies. In Bodies, she proposed new theory on how we acquire a bodily sense of self. The book includes case studies of amputees and children who have been fostered or adopted and offers a critique of the beauty, diet, style and pharmaceutical industries as well as current thinking on the 'obesity' crisis.

Another important area of her work relates to the dynamics in relationships. What do Women Want (written with Luise Eichenbaum), discusses the dynamics in couples, especially heterosexual ones, and explores issues of dependency and the impact of the mother/daughter, mother/son relationship on an adult's sense of self. In this book Orbach & Eichenbaum lay the foundations for more emotionally democratic intimate relationships, Bittersweet, now re-titled Between Women, (also written with Luise Eichenbaum) focuses on friendships, relationships at work and love affairs, between women. The book describes the merged attachments that can occur between women & the struggle to achieve separated attachments. In Understanding Women, Orbach and Eichenbaum theorise women's psychology from the perspective of their work at the Women's Therapy Centre and introduce the concept of 'the little girl inside'.

The Impossibility of Sex, was a new departure. It is a collection of imagined stories from therapy, written from the perspective of the therapist. The stories are interwoven with theory and a discussion of the key psychological concepts, as well as a frank discussion of the therapist's experience. Although these are imagined cases, they tell a truth about the daily struggles, ruminations and experience of being a therapist.

Orbach's new book In Therapy is due for publication by Profile Books in November 2016, and is based on the Radio 4 series of the same name broadcast 15–19 February 2016.

False bodies

Susie Orbach saw the false self as an overdevelopment (under parental pressure) of certain aspects of the self at the expense of other aspects — of the full potential of the self — producing thereby an abiding distrust of what emerges spontaneously from the individual himself or herself. Orbach went on to extend Winnicott's account of how environmental failure can lead to an inner splitting of mind and body, so as to cover the idea of the False Body — a falsified sense of one's own body. Orbach saw the female false body in particular as built upon identifications with others, at the cost of an inner sense of authenticity and reliability. Breaking up a monolithic but false body-sense in the process of therapy could allow for the emergence of a range of authentic (even if often painful) body feelings in the patient.

Journalism

For 10 years Orbach had a column in The Guardian on emotions in public and private life. These have been compiled into two volumes: What's Really Going on Here and Towards Emotional Literacy. She still writes for newspapers and magazines and campaigns vigorously on many fronts.

Books

Chapters in books