About Susie Orbach: Susie Orbach is a British psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer and social critic.
Public intellectuals come from a range of areas and use their expertise to comment more widely than just their field. They want to make a contribution to public space, and they stick their necks out to do it.
Mothers unconsciously allow more latitude to sons, and open encouragement, and with daughters they treat them as they would treat themselves.
'Skinny' is only one body type.
The insistence that the commercialisation of the body is a fit subject for political discussion and intervention is well overdue.
The truth is, we don't have an easy language for emotional life. That's why we have writers.
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.
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.
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.
We accept there's an emotional aspect to life. But we're not very developed in our ways of understanding it.
In my mum's day, you needed to be beautiful for a very short time to catch your man. It didn't start at six and go on until you're 75, right?
No one leaves a long-term relationship scot-free or without conflict.
Consumer society tantalises us. We then try within ourselves to control the needs that are being constantly stimulated.
Boys, young men, men of all ages are being captivated by the new visual grammar which pushes men to pout and posture.
I think what's most interesting about me is the work that I do.
There are so many young women who tip over into being a facsimile: they don't really inhabit their lives or their bodies.
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.
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.
