WTC London - Our Beginnings

Luise Eichenbaum and Susie Orbach

It was 1975. Juliet Mitchell’s Feminism and Psychoanalysis had been published the previous year marking, we thought, the UK as a beacon of feminist psychotherapy. But, when we arrived in London, there were, alas, no signs of feminist psychotherapists. 

We had studied and critiqued psychoanalytic theory with our feminist therapist group in New York, some of whom you know - Lela Zaphiropoulos, Carol Bloom, Laura Kogel, and when she visited from Berkeley, a standing invitation to Laurie Phillips. Our interest in therapy as a practice had come out of our understanding of the ways in which patriarchy and misogyny lived inside of us. They weren’t only external structures but internal structures. We knew that feminism could (and would) change the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

Feminism is what motivated us to study unconscious processes, our relationship to our minds, our bodies, and towards other women. It was the ‘70s. We were among the first graduates of the Women’s Studies Program at CUNY where Carol Bloom was the innovative graduate who along with Dorothy Riddle set up the program. The Women’s Liberation Movement was blossoming, we might say exploding, and thousands of women both here and abroad were attempting to articulate who they wanted to be in the world and naming the restraints designed by a patriarchal culture. 

Reflecting back now we see our mindsets born of an anti-war, civil rights, feminist activism were embedded in the belief that change was not only possible but necessary. Thus, we birthed the idea of starting a women’s therapy center. It seemed fairly straightforward at the time. Little did we know what we were letting ourselves in for. 

We wrote grant proposals on the backs of envelopes, learned how to talk to local city government, the press, and of course women.

We took over the garden flat of Susie’s house, we painted, we found some make-do consulting room furniture, and we put out a press release which said The Women’s Therapy Centre opens in North London. 

Local journalists and radio programs picked it up, asking why such an institution was needed. And the phone started ringing with women wanting to set up appointments. It wasn’t surprising that some of the initial patients were feminists, but it was the women who had never heard of a feminist or women’s liberation that affirmed our project. Our interviews struck a chord, spoke to women enough for them to ring and take the step of beginning psychotherapy. And at that time in the UK, that was no small step.

It was fortuitous that we were in London because we came across the writings of Ronald Fairbairn and Harry Guntrip of The Middle Group in psychoanalysis. Their work was not yet well known in the U.S. Their contributions to object relations theory were revolutionary in challenging and stepping away from instinct theory and moving towards a relational model. We felt we had finally landed on psychoanalytic theory that offered promise. It corresponded in significant ways to our own developing work. Of course, it was glaringly obvious that this body of work needed to be revised from a feminist perspective. There was no awareness of patriarchal social relations, its necessary divisions based on sex and gender (albeit completely binary at that time), or the power differentials which informed psychological development. But the clinical picture from Fairbairn, with his splitting of the ego, and the humanity of Guntrip’s relation to his patients, resonated deeply.

Our work was cut out for us.

As the Centre grew, first by two – Sally Berry and Margaret Green, then by more, we instituted two work meetings a week – one was clinical supervision, the other modeled on the group we had been part of in NYC - were on themes in women’s experience. 

The latter dovetailed nicely with a workshop program we offered to the public. These topics emerged from what we were picking up in our practice and what workshop leaders proposed. This then informed the themes we discussed in our Wednesday afternoon meeting. Topics ranged from women’s voice, women’s bodies, women’s conflicts, women’s power, women’s sexuality, women’s relationship to anger, to envy, to jealousy, to competition, to loss, to class. The list grew as did the scope of work at the Centre.

As the Centre grew, we needed an administrator, but as we had not yet received funding, we handled all of the admin as well. Answering the phones turned into a form of research as we listened to what each woman told us about her need for therapy. Combined with what we were hearing in our sessions, something previously unformulated was beginning to take shape. 

The Wednesday meeting also became a place to meet colleagues from other countries and cities to exchange ideas and ways of understanding and practicing. Jean Baker Miller came for two or three. A new feminist journal came to talk with us at another. We read Dinnerstein and Chodorow, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde. We read Winnicott and Ethel Person and Karen Horney and Franz Fanon. 

Over time, our new feminist psychoanalytic approach developed as we made use of Fairbairn’s model of the mind through a feminist lens. Each time we spoke of the little girl inside, suppressed, hidden and silenced, without any hesitation, our patients felt a part of them had been seen and named. Our feminism provided the frame in which our analysis of the patient/therapist relationship, transference, counter-transference, attachments, desire, differentiations, projective identifications could be held and understood anew.

In the more than 40 years of its existence The Women’s Therapy Centre provided therapy in many forms to thousands of women in many different languages. The organizational structure evolved - an outside Board of Directors, Executive Directors, funding from private foundations as well as government grants. What resonates for us still is the knowledge that we were also these women. We had our own relationship to the psychic structures of patriarchy and misogyny. And we knew that none of the theory building could have existed without our patients enriching us by sharing their most inner selves.