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Now established as a classic, Fat is a Feminist Issue analysed the psychology of dieting and over-eating in women. It explains how fat is not about food, but rather about protection, sex, mothering, strength, assertion, anger, and love.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapist, Jane Haberlin will be in conversation with Susie Orbach on this milestone anniversary to discuss how the text is even more relevant today than ever.
The story of the past 40 years is grim. It’s a story of malice, of greed and of mendacity. Not content with destabilising the eating of many western women and exporting body hatred all over the world as a sign of modernity, the combined forces of what investigative health reporter Alicia Mundy so aptly termed “Obesity Inc” set about to create new so-called disease entities; these would medicalise and pathologise people’s relationship to food and bodies so successfully that vast industries would grow up to treat problems that these industries had themselves instigated.
– Susie Orbach, The Guardian, June 2018
Susie Orbach is a psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and social critic. She has campaigned against media pressure on girls to feel dissatisfied with their physical appearance. Orbach created the Women’s Therapy Centre in 1976 and the Women’s Therapy Centre Institute, a training institute in New York, in 1981. In addition to FIFI she has written 12 books including In Therapy. She received the first ever Lifetime Achievement Award by the British Psychoanalytic Council in 2017. She was a member of the Government Expert Panel on Bodies. She took the issue to UN Women with the British Government in 2012 Mining Bodies: The New Colonialism, Huffington Post, 8th March 2012
Jane Haberlin is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist who has been accredited with the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy since 1996. She works as both a clinician with individuals, couples, and families, and as a clinical supervisor. Jane began her career in therapeutic communities, providing residential care and treatment to adolescents. Subsequently, she worked intensively at the Arbours Crisis Centre, an internationally renowned facility providing an alternative to in-patient hospital treatment for adults who have experienced acute emotional distress and mental illness. From there, she worked for a decade as a psychotherapist at the Women’s Therapy Centre in London.
