Hunger Strike: The Anorectic's Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age

by SusieOrbach (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2005

  $25.71

  Susie Orbach is a psychotherapist arid writer. With Luise Eichenbaum she co-founded The Women's Therapy Centre in London in 1976 and in 1981 The Women's Therapy Centre Institute in New York. She lectures extensively in Europe and North America, is a visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, and has a practice seeing individuals and couples and consulting to organizations. She is a frequent contributor to newspapers and magazines, as well as to radio and television programmes. Her other books on eating problems are Fat is a Feminist Issue (1978), Fat is a Feminist Issue II (1982) and On Eating (2002). With Luise Eichenbaum she has written Understanding Women: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Account (1982), What do Women Want (1983) and Between Women (1988). She is also the author of What's Really Going on Here (1993), Towards Emotional Literacy (1999) and The Impossibility of Sex (1999).

• Used

  Paperback
  1993

  $3.28

  In her examination of the anorectic's struggle, Susie Orbach sees women's eating problems as symbolizing the battle for autonomy in which every woman is engaged by identifying the first and most important arena of contention, a woman's body. As the author demonstrates, a woman's obsessive monitoring, severe reduction in food intake and the accompanying bingeing are a reflection of society's demands that she does not take up too much space, that she looks a certain way in order to be acceptable and that she curtails her needs in general. Yet anorexia also expresses a rebellion againts such ideas. It is, at another level, a cry of protest, a hunger strike against the contradictory and intolerable demands women face in contemporary society. In a new introduction, Susie Orbach discusses current attitudes towards eating problems and how they have changed over the last several years, and in a newly revised final chapter, she proposes an innovative approach to residential treatment that utilizes the meanings of anorexia to the sufferer as a basis for a therapy. The author also wrote Fat is a Feminist Issue .