Bodies Quotes

“When . . . the therapist registers an unexpected shift of mood in herself when she is with a patient, she begins a private inner dialogue with herself as to what it might mean. First she checks herself out, as though she is an object of study. What does the patient evoke in her? Why did she feel uptight just then? Why did she feel sad when the patient was making a light remark? Did the patient hit a particularly personal nerve? Such emotional states, which the therapist notices in herself, are called the counter-transference. As she cordons off the feelings and reflects on them, their dissonance alerts her: something difficult needs understanding. Her body, her emotional state, become a stethoscope-like instrument for hearing what might be askew.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“Touch is the most basic and fundamental of human experiences. Before we can suckle, before we can even see, we are enveloped by the welcoming arms of our mother. As we nestle into her body, feel the steadiness of her heartbeat, breathe her smell, we embed ourselves with her as our beacon. Her body, her voice, her skin, her touch become the way we orient ourselves as we make our personal journey through infancy, childhood and beyond. And touch is among the most crucial of these elements, not only providing us, in the case of loving touch, with a sense of security and ease in our bodies, but shaping our biology and our neurocircuitry in ways that will affect our tempers and our personalities throughout our lives.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“With the body judged externally, dismay will be rife. Success means looking younger every year, as the women in the gym seem to. Success means regulating the body: controlling hungers, desires, ageing and emissions. Success means seeing the body as a lifelong work. Success means anticipating faults - physical, medical, and aesthetic - and correcting them. But when and if the ordinary processes of the body cannot be sufficiently restraint, which of course they can't, the body becomes a source of consternation as well as failure.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“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.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“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.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“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.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“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.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“. . . 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.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“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.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“When we watch another human being making a movement, whether it is sticking out a tongue, carrying packages, swerving, dancing, eating, or clapping hands, our neurons fire in the same way, as if we ourselves were making the movement. From the brain's perspective . . . watching is pretty similar to doing. The brain has a built-in empathic and mimicking capacity. It translates what is seen through the eyes into the equivalent of doing and is structured to absorb and prepare itself for what we may not yet have mastered.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“We now know that there is a critical period for language development. If you do not learn to speak as a youngster, you may never learn to speak. The babbling-cooing between baby and mother is a proto-language developed on the way to structuring specific facial muscles: the shapes that the tongue, lips, cheek and jaw will make and the ear will process in the construction of language. The baby is repeating the sounds she or he hears. It takes a lot of practice to get your tongue, mouth, jaw and cheek muscles to coordinate and accurately reflect back what is heard.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“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.”
― Susie Orbach, 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.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies

“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.”
― Susie Orbach, Bodies