In Therapy: How conversations with psychotherapists really work by Susie Orbach

Buy In Therapy here.

Worldwide, increasingly large numbers of people are seeing therapists on a regular basis. In the UK alone, 1.5 million people are in therapy. We go to address past traumas, to break patterns of behaviour, to confront eating disorders or addiction, to talk about relationships, or simply because we want to find out more about what makes us tick.

Susie Orbach, the bestselling author of Fat is a Feminist Issue and Bodies, has been a psychotherapist for over forty years. Here, she explores what goes on in the process of therapy - what she thinks, feels and believes about the people who seek her help - through five dramatised case studies. Originally broadcast as a Radio 4 series, here the improvised dialogue is replicated as a playscript, and Orbach offers us the experience of reading along with a session, while revealing what is going on behind each exchange between analyst and client.

Insightful and honest about a process often necessarily shrouded in secrecy, In Therapy is an essential read for those curious about, or considering entering, therapy.

The Impossibility of Sex: Stories of the Intimate Relationship Between Therapist and Client

Buy The Impossibility of Sex here.

In these intriguing accounts, Susie Orbach, the celebrated author of Fat is a Feminist Issue, presents us with six imaginary clinical cases, including Adam, the serial seducer; Belle, the compulsive liar; and Joanne, the self-mutilator. Through them, Orbach presents an intriguing look into the hidden world of the consulting room. She demonstrates the way the therapist analyses her own feelings as well of those of the other person, making the therapy relationship a uniquely special place in which discoveries can be made, which enable the patient to change. Bravely, she details failure as well as success. The latter is not denoted by a triumphant denouement but by ensuring the patient is enabled to utilise new ways of thinking after therapy.

Fat Is A Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach

Buy Fat Is A Feminist Issue here.

THE ORIGINAL ANTI-DIET BOOK IS BACK - In one volume together with its bestselling sequel

When it was first published, Fat Is A Feminist Issue became an instant classic and it is as relevant today as it was then. Reflecting on our increasingly diet and body-obsessed society, Susie Orbach's new introduction explains how generations of women and girls are growing up absorbing the eating anxieties around them. In an age where women want to be sexy, nurturing, domestic goddesses, confident at work, and feminine too, the twenty-first-century woman is poorly armed for survival. Never before has the Fat Is A Feminist Issue revolution been more in need of revival.

Exploring our love/hate relationship with food, Susie Orbach describes how fat is about so much more than food. It is a response to our social situation; the way we are seen by others and ourselves. Too often food is a source of anguish, as are our bodies. But Fat Is A Feminist Issue discusses how we can turn food into a friend and find ways to accept ourselves for who and how we are. Following the step-by-step guide, and you too can put an end to food anxieties and dieting.

Hunger Strike: The Anorectic's Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age by Susie Orbach

Buy Hunger Strike here.

In this classic text, originally published in 1986, Susie Orbach brilliantly examines the anorectic's struggle. Anorexia is a battle; a battle to be thin; a battle of wills, denial versus desire. It is also about control; by conquering feelings of hunger, the anorectic woman aspires to conquer her emotional feelings as well. For Orbach, the struggle goes further. In this brilliant examination of women and eating disorders, she asserts that the complex relationship between women and food signifies women's battle for autonomy. Women's bodies are both private and public property. Society demands and expects women to look a certain way, to not take up too much space, to be self-effacing and mindful of others. Yet anorexia, whilst an extreme method of conforming to such demands, is conversely a rebellion against such ideas. It is the ultimate control over self, a cry of protest, a hunger strike against the contradictory and overwhelming demands placed on women in contemporary society.Also discussed are attitudes towards eating problems, and how they have changed over recent years, and an innovative approach to residential treatment. This book provides a highly original insight into the underlying causes of eating disorders.

Bodies by Susie Orbach

Buy Bodies here.

In the past decades, the pressure to perfect and design our bodies has been unprecedented. Men are encouraged to surgically pump up their pecs, breast enhancement is a sweet sixteen birthday present in the suburbs of America, and eating problems - from bulimia to obesity - are growing daily, affecting children as young as six. In China, women are having their legs broken and extended by 5cms. In Iran, behind the Hijab there are 35,000 cosmetic nose reconstructions a year. The body is no longer a given and to possess a flawless one has become the ambition of millions.

In her years of practice as a psychoanalyst, Susie Orbach has come to realise that the way we view our bodies is the mirror of how we view ourselves: our body becomes the measure of our worth. In this book, she raises the fundamental questions about how we arrived here and proposes a new theory on how we became embodied.

Susie Orbach speaks to New Books in Psychoanalysis about how the body is "no longer a place we live from" but rather a place where the capitalist marketplace has hit a sort of pay dirt.