In Conversation with Susie Orbach

Susie Orbach has spent her professional life thinking, writing, and theorising about the construction of gender. Her first book Fat is a Feminist Issue brought the issue of women’s relationship to their bodies and eating into public space offering new understandings about embodiment. She pursued this theme in Hunger Strike and Bodies (updated in 2019)). She’s an activist and founder member of the activist group EndangeredBodies.org

She co-founded The Women’s Therapy Centre in London in 1976 and the WTCI in NYC in 1981. Her interests have always been in bringing psychotherapeutic ways of thinking to social policy and to public discourse. She had a column in The Guardian newspaper for 10 years, has written and broadcasted widely about psychoanalysis. 

More recently her radio series for the BBC In Therapy was listened to by 2 million people live and many millions more on podcast. She put the thinking behind her interventions and what she understood into the book In Therapy.

She is the recipient of the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award given by The British Psychoanalytic Council. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019. She has numerous honorary doctorates and has written 13 books and hundreds of articles including recently on Climate Sorrow. She has consulted to The World Bank, The NHS, and many NGO’s. 

Susie is asking for members to send in questions for her to respond to on the day – email pcu.union@gmail.com