This Changes Everything The Relational Revolution in Psychology

Excerpted from This Changes Everythingby Christina Robb. Copyright 2006 by Christina Robb. Published in March 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. Introduction Relational psychology is the way the women's movement and other human rights movements of the 1960s moved into psychology. It is about how our ideas about psychological development and mental health have become democratic, and it came from questioning authoritymost important, questioning traditional answers about difference and relationship. Differenceof species, habitat, coloration, size, charactergives nature depth and strength. Why should some human beings tell a story that says differences are about better and worse? Relationships weave all creatures into the web of life. Why should some human beings tell a similar story about relationships, a story that says relationships are for weaklings and real men stand alone? And why are the human beings who tell these stories the ones who hold the most power? These were the kinds of questions in the back of Carol Gilligan's mind when, in 1975as a thirty-nine-year-old unpublished, part-time assistant professor of developmental psychology at Harvard, taking a year off to be with her three sons because her family had just moved from one suburb of Boston to anothershe heard in the voices of women a different story about difference. Across the Charles River in Cambridge and Somerville, Judith Lewis Herman, a young psychiatrist, and Lisa Hirschman, a young clinical psychologist, were listening to poor patients talk about incest. They weren't supposed to hear it. Their supervisors told them to ignore it when their patients talked about incest. Their textbooks said incest was rarer than rare, a case in a million. But their patients told them they had suffered incest, sexual abuse, and rape and had histories of prolonged and repeated trauma. Herman and Hirschman were women and their patients were women. They realized that what they were hearing and why they weren't supposed to hear it were political as well as medical problems, and the incidence of father-daughter incest they found was exponentially greater than medical science said it was. They were picking up where Freud left off more than a century ago, before he retracted his discovery that childhood trauma, especially sexual trauma, can cause the most severe mental illnesses. And they wereas Freud was, and as most psychotherapists still arelistening to women and girls at a time of great and democratizing social change. In fact, in 1975, inside a radius of about five miles, three revolutionary projects were afoot near Boston: Carol Gilligan was recording the different, not deviant, voice she was hearing in women making moral decisions. Herman and Hirschman were counting cases of incest for the first time ever. And the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jean Baker Miller was writing about the politics of dominance and the politics of relationship and about how being subordinate in a culture of dominance hurt her women patients and warped the dominant psychology's view of women. Working at home in Brookline, the same little suburb of Boston that Gilligan had just moved to, Miller filled her book with insights from women clients she met in a storefront clinic and in the middle-class comfort of her private office, from the explorations of two consciousness-raising groups, and from her own search for forerunners among pioneer women psychologists. Toward a New Psychology of Women, published in 1976, demonstrated that what male psychologists had labeled women's weaknesseshypersensitivity, merging, dependency needscould be seen as strengths: authenticity, empathy, a drive to connect, and the skRobb, Christina is the author of 'This Changes Everything The Relational Revolution in Psychology', published 2006 under ISBN 9780374275815 and ISBN 0374275815.