WTCI Records

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). Each board member of WTCI has history in the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s as well as the other struggles for justice like the , civil rights, LGBTQI+ liberation, and anti-war movements. WTCI believes 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. The board and faculty of WTCI form a non-hierarchical collective and donate their labor, and their goal is to bring an intersectional anti-oppressive lens to the field, the treatment room, and the community. WTCI is perhaps best known for their innovative theory and clinical work on eating problems and embodiment issues.

At the time of WTCI's founding, feminism had not been a part of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychoanalytic theory. WTCI sought to show how the body/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 created The Women's Therapy Centre in 1976. Given how long the waitlist for The Women's Therapy Centre became, the founders started a clinic and classes to raise consciousness about a feminist approach which became a thriving government funded clinic for a number of decades.

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. At the time of its founding, WTCI was the only postgraduate feminist psychotherapy training institute. The WTCI’s first foray into public space was a Friday Night Lecture Series on Women and Psychology in 1982, open to practitioners and interested others at the New York Academy of Sciences.

WTCI attracted some of the best clinicians, academics, and writers to speak to a rapt audience. These Friday Night Lectures created a safe and inviting space for women to give bold presentations to explore new and radical ideas in clinical praxis, and to contest the status quo in their institutions and workplaces. Presenters included Teresa Bernardez, Ruth Moulton, Sophie Freud-Lowenstein, Harriet Lerner, Jessica Benjamin, Muriel Dimen, Ethel Person and WTCI members.

For the past 30 years WTCI has hosted the yearly Laurie Phillips Memorial Lecture which honors feminist clinicians and scholars.

In 1982, WTCI began holding Speak Outs for women, emulating the Speak Outs held by the Women's Liberation Movement; speakers at WTCI have included Gloria Steinem, Susie Orbach, Jamia Wilson, Jane Hirschmann, Carol Munter, Eve Ensler, Courtney Martin and other prominent feminist and body activists. WTCI’s innovative theory understood mothers’ subjectivity and the body as central to understanding women’s psychological development and the cultural influences that create psychic structure.

The Speak Outs were a community event. Eventually, the Speak Outs were called Indwelling, after the concept coined by British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, and developed into a larger, yearly event that addresses living securely in one's body and includes an open microphone Speak Out and contributions from artists and body activists. WTCI faculty began offering workshops and psycho-educational groups for the public and practitioners. WTCI offered its first official three-year training program in 1989 called Feminist Relational Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. In 1998, they launched a one-year training program called Eating and the Body: A Cultural Relational Psychoanalytic Framework. WTCI emphasized the importance of writing in a style that was accessible to both practitioners and the public.

WTCI has graduated 17 post-graduate training programs and continues to offer training, workshops, seminars and public events.