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

by Susie Orbach

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).

Genres: Feminism, Psychology, Nonfiction, Mental Health, Research

224 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 3, 1986

About the author

Dr. Susie Orbach - the therapist who treated Diana, Princess of Wales, for her eating disorders; the founder of the Women's Therapy Center of London; a former columnist for The Guardian; a visiting professor at the London School of Economics; and the author of 1978 best-seller Fat is a Feminist Issue - is, aside from Sigmund Freud, probably the most famous psychotherapist to have ever set up couch in Britain.

Reviews

[Holly]

The first half of this book (written in 1986) talks about anorexia as a subconscious response to the lack of agency and societal mixed messages presented to women by society. The second, weaker, half is directed more at therapists treating anorexics, focusing on what works (talking, providing a safe space to express needs) and what doesn't (force feeding or otherwise taking control away from the woman in question). It's interesting to compare to Michelle Stacey's "The Fasting Girl", discussing young women in the mid-nineteenth century who took to their beds and claimed to not eat at all.

I would be interested in finding out how Orbach interprets the current trend towards extreme thinness, buttressed by the tendency towards extreme Photoshopping of already thin models.

[Janet Holt]

Rating: 5

[Josephine (Taylor’s Version)]

Underlying hunger by btrz-wrns on Wattpad

[Rebecca]

I have been "watching what I eat" (note careful avoidance of the word "dieting") for a few months now, and was beginning to second-guess my own motivations. This book had been sitting on my shelf since university, so I decided to re-read it, along with Atwood's "The Edible Woman".

The extent to which I recognised and sympathised with the cultural background noise described does make me question the extent to which practical feminism may have stalled since Hunger Strike was first published, way back in the mists of 1986.

Why is it that women must sculpt their bodies to a certain template in order to be deemed acceptable? Why do so many of my beautiful, curvy friends struggle to buy clothes from high street stores that actually fit? Why are we expected to devote so much time and brain power to the topic of food and the effort of not eating it, and what could we be getting done instead if we were permitted to stop? On a more personal level, am I simply engaged in a mind - over - matter experiment in fruit and vegetable ingestion, or are there a whole bunch of other demons at play here?

I am not anorectic, and this isn't light reading; but if any of the questions above have recently engaged your brain, it's worth picking up.

[Jodie Gale]

This book was recommended by my own psychotherapist and was the impetus for my recovery from bulimia 20 years ago. It shaped the way I work in long-term, depth psychotherapy with women suffering with eating disorders and with the mother/daughter relationship. A must read for all ED specialists.

[Elizabeth]

yeah, get angry.

[Anna]

Politicizing the body.