Psychoanalyst & Writer
Catherine Baker-Pitts
Consulting and writing on gender, the body, and the stories we tell.
Consulting and writing on gender, the body, and the stories we tell.
A graduate of the program (2009–2012), I have twice organized a long-weekend conference for the New Directions Writing Program in Washington, DC, at the meeting point of psychoanalysis and writing craft: Family Legacies: The Stories We Tell (2016) and Sisterhood (2023). I am now organizing a third, Crafting Characters, for 2027.
Lecturer at more than fifty colleges and universities on feminist activism and body positivity.
I am a psychoanalyst and writer. I split my time between New York City and Mount Desert Island, Maine.
My work, on the page and in the consulting room, keeps returning to how we live in a body: a trans or gender-nonconforming body, a fat body, a sexual and sexualized body, a traumatized body, a mourning body, a declining body. My ideas flourish where psychoanalysis meets intersectional feminism, buttressed by the principles of Harm Reduction, Gender Affirmative Care, and Health at Every Size.
For over a decade I was a member of The Body Attachment Group, affiliated with the New School for Social Research, an international team of feminist psychoanalysts, body and movement therapists, and infant attachment researchers studying the transgenerational transmission of anxiety in the body from caregiver to child.
As adjunct faculty at NYU and a guest lecturer at New York psychoanalytic institutes, including ICP, the Gestalt Institute, WTCI, and the William Alanson White Institute, I have taught Gender Trauma, Object Relations Theory, Weight Bias and Fat Acceptance, Critical Approaches to Cosmetic and Weight Loss Surgery, Transgender Health, and Attachment Theory. I served for nine years as book review editor of Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment and Prevention and was a founding member of the National Eating Disorders Association in 2001.
I maintain a psychoanalytic practice in Harlem.
When I am not ruminating on the unconscious or resisting the patriarchy, I am biking around the city, hiking moss-covered granite boulders with my sisters, or designing whimsical spaces with bold fabrics and textures.
