Bodies

"Susie Orbach is a so-called relational psychoanalyst, and she wrote this book, Bodies , where she looks at how the body is perceived in post-industrial, late capitalism. Again we have the idea of body as a product, something that you work on and that is completely in your power. Of course, the cosmetics and dieting industries have hugely contributed to this, so she makes a social critique, pointing out that in some way capitalism relies on our unhappiness with the body. Yes, I think that they do, which is why she speaks about women who really find a painful enjoyment in being fat. She finds for a lot of women being fat is a protection – a shield either from love, or from being perceived as a sexual woman. It’s very readable – each story starts with the story of a client of her clinical practice: women of various ages and their unhappinesses. She looks at why women perceive the body as a product, what role the obsession with thinness plays, and how it culturally changes. For instance, she looks at Fiji, which some years ago perceived a little bit more rounded body as an ideal; now they have a huge increase of anorexia which she links to the influence of the media on this society. “In some way. capitalism relies on our unhappiness with the body.” She looks at what image is proposed by the dominant media, what impressions it gives to young women. She also looks at very particular mother-daughter relationships which are emerging: how an obsession with body image is being passed from generation to generation. Sometimes it happens that mothers instil this enormous feeling of guilt to their daughters over their bodies, because of their own anxieties with their own bodies. What I like about her work is that she’s also looking at the new symptoms she observes in practice. She said recently that she’s observing more and more women, mid-thirties, coming to her office who actually had made ideal choices in their lives, and ticked all the right boxes on the life plan: they found the best job, best school, great clothes, even have a great body and a great partner, and they come to analysis with the fact that they are empty – so they don’t even have a complaint. This is exactly where a new problem is emerging for psychoanalysts: you have an emptiness – or, going back to Leader’s book, you would say a new form of depression. There should have been satisfaction: ‘I thought if I do everything right, there’ll be this feeling of fulfilment at the end, so why am I miserable?’ No, it looks at male bodies too: it has a whole section about men trying to create an ideal body so it’s definitely not only for women, but of course it has more examples of female clients than male clients."