Bodies

Description

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 is a psychoanalyst and writer. She co-founded The Women's Therapy Centre in 1976 and is the author of many books including Fat is a Feminist Issue, Hunger Strike, On Eating, The Impossibility of Sex, Bodies, and In Therapy. Susie has a clinical practice seeing individuals and couples. Find her on Twitter @psychoanalysis

This is a serious book - and one of the saddest I've read in a long time. It is grounded in compassion, righteous anger and practical good sense ... I came away having learnt something. We are at war with our own bodies, and both sides are losing. * Daily Mail * A terrifying, terrific read * Scotland on Sunday * Could make you rethink starting that post-Christmas diet. A 2010 must-have if you want to understand your body issues. * Now * Original in her diagnoses and sympathetic in her treatment, she comes across as the intellectual lovechild of Freud and Trisha. How could this not be compulsive reading? -- Laura Silverman * Daily Mail * Combining heartfelt polemic with heartbreaking case studies, Bodies unpicks the tangle of influences that conspire against a "stable body" -- Victoria Segal * Guardian * A timely counterblast against our harsh new visual culture, obsessed with the perfection of the physical self. * the Times * [A] superb analysis of the range of ways one can change one's body and the number of images of the body one encounters. -- Lesley McDowell * Herald [Glasgow] * A smart and rich compendium of what is going on within and without our bodies today ... in this brave and significant book, Orbach does battle with a full quiver of her own fire-tipped arrows, her blazing firebrand levelled at self-hatred in all its forms. * The Times *