Quotes from Susie Orbach

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

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.

If you continually diet, you are putting your body in a quasi-famine situation. It slows your metabolism down and breaks the thermostat. Diets don't work. They don't help you understand why you're eating more than your body wanted in the first place.

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.

If you continually diet, you are putting your body in a quasi-famine situation. It slows your metabolism down and breaks the thermostat. Diets don't work. They don't help you understand why you're eating more than your body wanted in the first place.

The truth is, we don't have an easy language for emotional life. That's why we have writers.

I thought of the analyst Winnicott's observation: 'It is a joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found'.

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

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.

Celebrity culture is something that pains me.

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

For a baby to thrive she or he has to be more than fed and kept clean. She or he needs to be held and to be engaged with as a living baby. This last thought might sound a bit mad. Of course a baby is alive. But if a baby receives only perfunctory care, if her or his needs for food and water and changing are met in a production-line manner, as happened for the many abandoned babies in the Romanian orphanes after Ceausescu was toppled, she or he may not thrive; she may die.

my experience as a psychotherapist working with people with troubled bodies shows that the kind of touch we receive when we are little and the impact of a mother's (or carer's) physical sense of herself are crucial to the development of our own body sense. Our bodies are a lot more than an executed blueprint given by our DNA.

I know people often think that psychoanalysts are analysing them in social situations but that is not the case. Psychoanalytic understanding comes from the special conditions of the consulting room and the analytic relationship. That is when it is at its strongest and most convincing.

A good 2,000 to 5,000 times a week, we receive images of bodies enhanced by digital manipulation. These images convey an idea of a body which does not exist in the real world.

The curious thing about dieting is that if it worked, you would only have to do it once. Diet companies rely on a 95 per cent recidivism rate: a figure that should be etched into every dieter's consciousness.

There is also clear evidence that the most protective weight for health purposes is a BMI of 27.5 (if one accepts the BMI at all) - a figure that is presently in the recently designated overweight category. Interestingly, overweight people who exercise have a lower mortality rate that thin people who do not. So one is led to wonder why thin has erroneously become the gold standard for health.

you could use your mouth to speak rather than to inhale.

We experience the wish for more perfect bodies as our own desire, as indeed it is, yet it is hard to separate out the ways bodies are seen, talked about and written about and the effect of that on our own personal perception of our own bodies and other bodies.

our visual world is being transformed through an intensification of images which represent the body and parts of the body in ways that artfully convey a sense that are own bodies are seriously in need of reshaping and updating.

Children who feel that they are unloved can believe that there must be something very wrong about them which makes them unacceptable. The stinging sense of being not right causes them confusion and hurt, but they do not give up the desire for love and acceptance. They despair of it, certainly. They pine for it and perhaps fear it. But their pursuit of love and acceptance will dovetail with an attempt to change themselves into someone the child himself can accept.

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.

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

Many young girls are constantly consumed by controlling and managing their body image to the extent that they are much more involved in the production of the self than in living.