A biography for Susie Orbachhasn’t been written yet.
“'Skinny' is only one body type.”
“Mothers unconsciously allow more latitude to sons, and open encouragement, and with daughters they treat them as they would treat themselves.”
“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.”
“Boys, young men, men of all ages are being captivated by the new visual grammar which pushes men to pout and posture.”
“I'm a therapist and that fascinates people because they think I carry secrets.”
“From a child's point of view, there is rarely a great time for parents to separate, even if there has been a lot of commotion and fighting.”
“We accept there's an emotional aspect to life. But we're not very developed in our ways of understanding it.”
“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.”
“There is no such thing as a neutral therapist.”
“I'm the sort of person who likes to undo everything.”
“Fat people are so rarely included in visual culture that fat is perceived as a blot on the landscape of sleek and slim.”
“I've always felt very sympathetic from the first days of writing about women that, whatever the woman, whether she is trying to be a woman in the conventional sense or breaking the boundaries, those struggles are quite difficult.”
“I think what's most interesting about me is the work that I do.”
“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.”
“I think it is one of the capacities of human beings, to create style.”
“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.”
“Beauty has been democratised. No longer the preserve of movie stars and models but available to all. But while the invitation to beauty is welcomed, it has become not so much an option as an imperative.”
“The insistence that the commercialisation of the body is a fit subject for political discussion and intervention is well overdue.”