Bodies: Big Ideas [Paperback]

`A rousing polemic on the western obsession with physical perfection' --India Knight, Sunday Times

We may be the last generation to inhabit bodies not routinely reconstructed by surgical enhancements. Over the last decades, our body has become an individual statement and a crucial personal responsibility. For many of us, it is the source of terrible difficulty while for others it is an expensive commodity...

In the past decades, the pressure to perfect and design our bodies has been unprecedented. Breast enhancement is a sweet sixteen birthday present in the suburbs of America, while eating problems - from bulimia to obesity - are growing daily, affecting girls as young as six. The body is no longer a given and to possess a flawless one has become the ambition of millions. In China, women are having their legs broken and extended by 5cms. In Iran, behind the Hijab there are 35,000 cosmetic nose reconstructions a year. In Brazil breasts and bottoms are reshaped along with the face so that women there, as in China and Iran (and pretty much everywhere else in reach of global media) can reflect western norms of beauty. In her years of practice as a psychoanalyst, Susie Orbach has come to realise that the way we view our bodies is the mirror of how we view ourselves: our body becomes the measure of our worth. In this book, she finally raises the fundamental questions about how we got there.

Professor Susie Orbach - the therapist who treated Princess Diana for her eating disorders - is the founder of the Women's Therapy Centre 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. She is probably the most famous psychotherapist to have set up couch in Britain since Sigmund Freud. She lives in London.