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Hunger Strike: Starving Amidst Plenty
This is Susie Orbach’s classic text on anorexia, where for the first time the myths and misconceptions of an emerging cultural epidemic were dispelled. Since its initial publication in 1986, Hunger Strike has been at the center of the debate over anorexia. This beautifully repackaged edition includes Susie Orbach’s 1993 introduction, which discusses more recent attitudes toward eating problems and how they have changed over the last several years, and a revised final chapter, in which she proposes an innovative approach to residential treatment that utilizes the meanings of anorexia to the sufferer as a basis for therapy.
260 pages, Paperback
First published February 3, 1986
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About the author
Susie Orbach
48 books214 followersDr. 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.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 17, 2010
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.
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.
December 23, 2022
Rating: 5
May 6, 2023
Underlying hunger by btrz-wrns on Wattpad
May 17, 2014
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.
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.
April 22, 2018
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.
July 16, 2007
yeah, get angry.
July 27, 2007
Politicizing the body.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews