cover image This Changes Everything: The Relational Revolution in Psychology

This Changes Everything: The Relational Revolution in Psychology

Christina Robb, . . Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30 (454pp) ISBN 978-0-374-27581-5

Robb, a former Boston Globe staffer, presents a celebratory history of the pioneering women psychologists who in the '70s began to challenge traditional concepts of the self and of women's psychological "deficiencies," and advanced their own women-centered theories. Robb opens by describing how Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan came to write her groundbreaking In a Different Voice, which argued that for women the idea of the self is intimately bound up in a network of close relationships. Robb goes on to describe how other women psychologists and psychiatrists—including Jean Baker Miller, Mary Belenky, Lisa Hirschman, Judith Lewis Herman and Janet L. Surrey—arrived at similar findings. Disseminating their ideas via consciousness-raising groups in the Boston area, these women regarded gender differences as "systemic rather than essential." Through research organizations and bestselling books, they dramatically revised notions of childhood development, incest, posttraumatic stress and sexual pleasure. Drawing on interviews, Robb mingles her subjects' personal and professional histories with case histories that illustrate their theories, and with the commentaries of other experts in related fields. Although Robb's admiring tone is sometimes cloying and she generalizes about women, her richly anecdotal history is a must-read for all those interested in the field of women's psychology. (Mar.)