WTCI Records, 1976-2024

Founded in 1981, WTCI, formerly known as the Women's Therapy Centre Institute, is a feminist relational psychotherapy training institute that offers clinical training "based on contemporary relational theory and intersectional feminist thought" (WTCI). As Susan Gutwill, one of the founders and board members of WTCl writes, "each of us on the board of the WTCI is rooted in the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1960's and 1970's as well as the other struggles for justice in our times… We have never lost our belief in the importance of feminist therapy to understand that gender mandates are central to all psychological development which is itself embedded in the political, economic and socio-symbolic realities of our lives" (Gutwill 3). The board and faculty of WTCI form a non-hierarchical collective and donate their labor, and their goal is to "bring an anti-oppressive lens to the field, the treatment room, and the community" (WTCI). WTCI is perhaps best known for their work on eating disorders.

WTCI began as a feminist therapy study group in the wake of the feminist and Leftist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. At the time of WTCI's founding, feminism had not been a part of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory. WTCI sought to show how the soul and psyche are constructed and shaped by systemic power structures. In the late 1970s, Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum, two of the founders of WTCI, went to London, assuming they would find a feminist psychoanalytic movement there; when they did not, they decided to create an institution called The Women's Therapy Centre (WTC) in 1976. Given how long the waitlist for The Women's Therapy Centre became, the founders started a program to train therapists (Gutwill, 3-4). The Women's Therapy Centre and WTCI were sister organizations, with WTC offering clinical services and WTCI offering post-graduate training.

In 1981, Orbach and Eichenbaum returned to the U.S. to found a New York branch of The Women's Therapy Centre, along with Carol Bloom. The founders of the New York branch were Carol Bloom, Luise Eichenbaum, and Susie Orbach. In 1982, they began holding speak outs for women, emulating the speak outs held by the Women's Liberation Movement; speakers at WTCI have included Gloria Steinem (Gutwill 22). These speak outs were eventually called Indwelling, after the work of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, and developed into a larger, yearly event that addresses living securely in one's body and includes an open mic speak out and contributions from artists.

WTCI faculty initially began offering workshops and psychoeducational groups for the public and for practitioners. After beginning with lecture training and workshops, WTCI offered its first official three-year training program called Feminist Relational Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, in 1989. In 1998, they launched a one-year training program called Eating and the Body: A Cultural Relational Psychoanalytic Framework (Gutwill 8). WTCI emphasized the importance of writing in a style that was accessible to both practitioners and the public.

From the very beginning, WTCI emphasized the relationship between the psyche and larger socio-political forces (Gutwill, 6). Typically, psychoanalytic therapists were encouraged to set aside their political beliefs in order to remain "neutral"; instead, WTCI believes that "the awareness of one's subjective stance, including social and political beliefs, must be a part of what the analyst acknowledges that she or he is bringing to the analytic relationship" (Gutwill, 6).

Further, WTCI sought to move away from psychoanalytic developmental theories that had centered the narratives and lived experiences of white males. Deemphasizing Freudian and Kleinian one-person psychoanalytic theories, the founders of WTCI built on the object relations theories of Winnicott and Fairbairn, "challenging the limits of Freudian thinking by focusing on pre-oedipal experience" and rejecting the denigration of mothers in the Freudian model (Gutwill 11). In particular, according to Susan Gutwill, one of the founders of WTCI, "our special contribution, both theoretically and clinically, has centered on women's emotional and physical distress as expressed in eating and body image disorders," particularly challenging fatphobia and diet culture (Gutwill, 17). In the early days of WTCI, gender was the primary focus, and the WTCI has gradually expanded its scope and practice to move towards a more intersectional feminist psychoanalysis that acknowledges and includes the lived experiences of the BIPOC and LGBTQ communities.

Along with Indwelling, each year WTCI also hosts the Laurie Phillips Memorial Lecture, which honors feminist clinicians and scholars.

Sources:
Susan Gutwill, "The Personal Is Political," 2010, draft.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250923142238/https://www.wtci-nyc.org/