Top 30 Susie Orbach Quotes

There are so many young women who tip over into being a facsimile: they don’t really inhabit their lives or their bodies.

In general, the Western body has become a global brand.

Mothers unconsciously allow more latitude to sons, and open encouragement, and with daughters they treat them as they would treat themselves.

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.

Consumer society tantalises us. We then try within ourselves to control the needs that are being constantly stimulated.

No one likes to feel helpless. We find it psychologically unbearable and inside ourselves we may try to make ourselves part author of our misfortune rather than simply the recipient of it.

Fat is a way of saying no to powerlessness and self-denial.

A wanted pregnancy as much as a dreaded pregnancy can play differently than all one’s previous imaginings.

Bodies are becoming our personal mission to tame, extend and perfect.

If I were afraid of wrinkles, I’d probably be hiding in a cupboard, because I have a lot of them.

Celebrity culture is something that pains me.

Fat people are so rarely included in visual culture that fat is perceived as a blot on the landscape of sleek and slim.

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.

Not that it was Twiggy’s fault, but the ubiquity of her image created a sense in young women that to be stylish meant to be skinny, flat-chested with an ingenue face and straight hair.

The parents‘ job is to be there for their kids, not the other way round. Troubles between parents need to be talked through with friends and not visited on the children.

Dare to be as physically robust and varied as you always were.

No one leaves a long-term relationship scot-free or without conflict.

I’m the sort of person who likes to undo everything.

Boys, young men, men of all ages are being captivated by the new visual grammar which pushes men to pout and posture.

We accept there’s an emotional aspect to life. But we’re not very developed in our ways of understanding it.

There is no such thing as a neutral therapist.

I think what’s most interesting about me is the work that I do.

Our idea of a healthy body is so destabilised that insecure people have come to bolster their own bodies by deeming others – those with fat bodies – less worthy, less capable and less employable.

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.

When I was growing up, one or two girls were beautiful, but it was not an aspiration, right?

I’d like to see much more understanding of emotional issues around hurt, abandonment, disappointment, longing, failure and shame, where they stem from and how they drive people and policies brought into public discourse.

I’m a therapist and that fascinates people because they think I carry secrets.

Today, ‘fat’ has become not a description of size but a moral category tainted with criticism and contempt.

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’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.