A compelling account of how women transformed the field of psychology

May 31, 2006|Thomas J. Cottle, Globe Correspondent

This Changes Everything: The Relational Revolution in Psychology, By Christina Robb, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 454 pp., $30

Forty years ago, in "The Duality of Human Existence," David Bakan proffered a distinction between an alleged masculine orientation to action and exerting power, and a feminine communing orientation. Women, he wrote, were socialized to orient their lives around relationships. I cannot recall whether Bakan cited Heidegger's provocative notion that we don't have relationships as much as we are relationships. In fact, in enunciating three modes of being, Heidegger suggested that at all times we deal with the biological world into which we are thrown, the world of consciousness and identity in which we are thrown against ourselves, and, most significantly for the present discussion, the world of relationships.

At about the same time, family systems theorists such as Minuchin, Haley, Bowen, and Whitaker predicated an approach to the study of human behavior on the dynamics of family relationships rather than psychic histories of family members. In the world of psychology, this position constituted a revolutionary step, but one that awaited, perhaps, that special feminine sensibility.

In "This Changes Everything," Christina Robb , a former Globe staffer, has recounted, in magnificent manner, the evolution of relational psychology and with it the transformation of contemporary psychological theory and practice. As it happens, many of the original contributors are Boston physicians, professors, and psychotherapists -- Jean Baker Miller, Carol Gilligan, and Judith Lewis Herman having emerged as the most renowned.

To pierce the political and cultural underpinnings of patriarchy that dominated American and European psychology, this small group of extraordinary women began to think and write about the personal experiences that had shaped their own psychologies. Not surprisingly, they discovered that concepts such as the autonomous self, independence, individualism, competition, and morality as justice were hardly the cornerstones of their lives, or, for that matter, the lives of most women. Accordingly, they began exploring not only the minds of the patients, students, and colleagues with whom they communed, but the substance, both seen and sensed, that was their connection to these people.