In Bodies Susie Orbach continues her crusade to show us the variety of ways in which bodies (mainly, but not only, female bodies) are acted upon by their ‘owners’ to create monuments to personal, perhaps parental/maternal neglect. We are obsessed, she observes, with our frail corporeality, something upon which we can exercise control, whereas the psyche seems so much less accessible.

As we have come to expect from Orbach, this is a fine exercise in both writing and expression, in a very particular genre: the psychoanalytic kind. And perhaps that is where most mortals, and I include most psychiatrists, will be left panting, trying to keep up with the less-than-straightforward perspective that an analysand and their analyst inhabit daily. To them, the notion of expressing oneself through creating physical and emotional feelings within an observer is commonplace. To us, hard to comprehend: the immaculate client creating a sense of bodily disgust in the (equally immaculate) Orbach; the analyst dressing for her patient, aware that she needs to compete for her own sense of beauty; expressing her client's needs within her own body. Yes, words do not do it, but physical discomfort does. One of the triumphs of this book is how simple, yet moving and beautiful an account Orbach provides of body dysmorphia and the illness it breeds in the sufferer.

Running through the landscape of Orbach's clinical analytic life is her long-term interest in neuroscience. She explores intelligent (if slimly tenable on current evidence) views about brain mechanisms involved in body dysmorphia and its manifestations. For most readers who will have no psychoanalytic experience, the language may put off. But I would encourage all clinicians working in psychiatric services (especially with women) to persist. At 160 pages, this is not a great burden on one's time. And the investment is likely to bear fruit in a better understanding of some of the more baffling symptoms and disorders we encounter in psychiatric practice.