WTCI Begins!
Carol Bloom and Susie Orbach
Carol Bloom, Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum had all been reading and thinking together despite the distance and so it made sense when we were in the same city once again in 1981 to create a project which expressed our shared vision.
Our first foray into public space was The WTCI Friday Night Lecture Series on Women and Psychology in 1982, open to practitioners and interested others, held at the New York Academy of Sciences.
We were lucky to attract some of the best clinicians, academics, and writers to speak to a rapt audience (of mostly women) over several years. Together with the women who came and spoke, those Friday nights created a safe and inviting space for women to give bold presentations, to test out radical ideas, and to contest the status quo in their institutions or workplaces.
Many of the women we first met at that time, Anne Leiner, Andrea Gitter and Susan Gutwill, as well as Lela Zaphiropoulos from the Feminist Therapists Study Group from 1974-5 joined the core group to expand the Institute’s offerings by extending the course study on Feminist Therapy and Practice which Luise and Susie started in London and which became the backbone to their first book, Understanding Women. This core group, which evolved into the board, met every Thursday for years and was joined by Laura Kogel and Laurie Phillips by the time we began our first training program.
We were committed to offering a feminist training and practice tailored to women’s experience; their social, cultural, race, class, sexual orientation, and geographic location and how that is psychically and bodily structured into who they, who we are. We didn’t see the same need to open a therapy Center as we had in London so training and outreach of our ideas became our project and mission.
In 1982, emboldened by the interest in our lecture series, we held our First Speak Out, now known as InDwelling. 400 women came. Young and old, students and workers, professionals including therapists attended, all longing for knowledge and community. Just as in the early Abortion and Rape Speak Outs, individual women – nervous, exuberant, tentative, moving – gave testimony about their troubled experiences with eating and not-eating, body hatreds, mother-daughter tangles, racism, class, discrimination, prejudice, homophobia and, of course, with their longings and desires. We were linking what we heard in the consulting room with a cultural-political analysis and activism. It was exhilarating, inspiring and, as ever, maddening to witness so much woman-pain.
We had waiting lists for our Eating and Body Image groups. We trained leaders, spoke in schools, hospitals and counseling centers. Our radical practice of anti-diet, nurturing eating and listening to the body gave a way to decipher the anguished code women were speaking. This training was the precedent of our formal training programs on the body.
Activism, social engagement and extending the field of feminism and psychoanalysis were what drove the beginning years of the WTCI. When we launched the Three-Year Training Program on feminist relational theory and psychotherapy (1989-92) then a One Year Program on eating and the body (1999) and along with the WTCA and the initiatives since then, we have been guided by these principles and the energy of the many newer women who have joined us. We are 15 training programs later and have over 100 graduates, many of whom are teaching, on the board, and on committees. WTCI is a feminist dream fulfilled!