Jean Baker Miller: Changing the World a Day at a Time

When I think of Jean two vivid memories come to mind: one is of my receiving some of the chapters of her groundbreaking book: Towards a New Psychology of Women and my excitement in reading it and the other is of Jean and I smoking and laughing in our hotel room. We often shared rooms in those early days in the seventies because we were some of the few smokers left. Those were heady times; the women’s movement was at a peak and spreading into every classroom and every home and moving into the inhospitable male bastions to bring change and freedom to women everywhere.

We were powerfully influenced and inspired by Betty Friedan’s “Feminist Mystique,” Adrienne Rich, Gloria Steinem, Phyllis Chesler, and other sisters of the feminist movement of the sixties. I had just moved to a University position at Michigan State University’s Department of Psychiatry in an innovative and welcoming medical school. I had left organized psychoanalysis disheartened by its misconceptions about women, and their disavowing of our right to revolt. I pursued my interest in psychoanalysis on my own and began to write about my views of the socio-cultural norms that ruled the behavior of women. Jean came to meet me after my first presentation at American Psychiatric Association (APA) on “Women and Anger” and shortly after I received her chapters.

With her, we joined innumerable battles at home, at the university, in the medical school, and nationally with a courageous group of women psychiatrists determined to bring the women’s revolution to the American Psychiatric Association.

We shared moments of great excitement in our determination to transform the ways our discipline saw the diagnosis and treatment of women. Jean’s brilliant insights were accompanied by a great humility and simplicity of manner. She was of delicate figure and yet transmitted a strength of character and an authority in her very presence that was compelling. She had had polio as a child that left her with an atrophied leg and limp. But she did not let that get in her way. Gentle, rational and persuasive, she was a careful listener as well. We had similar aims and similar upbringings in psychoanalysis, having been similarly disillusioned by discriminatory practices and rigid theorizing.

Jean had formed an intimate work group with Irene Stiver, Judith Jordan, Janet Surrey, and Alexandra Kaplan, her collaborators in a number of projects in Boston. For my part, being the only woman professor in my department, I had to gradually create a cadre of women students and colleagues with feminist aspirations and join the few women faculty in the University to organize our efforts. Jean and I shared each other’s struggles and fought many battles together in the national arena. We were few women psychiatrists: with Alexandra Symmonds we stood firm for the passing of the ERA, (the Equal Rights Amendment), we opened up the curriculum of courses and the presentation of papers and panels by women in the annual convention and began a serious revision of the approaches to the psychotherapy of women.

A significant accomplishment of Jean was the development of a relational theory of development that vindicated the strengths of women in areas that had been pathologized and revealed the importance of connections and interdependence rather than the spurious conception of “autonomy.” On my part I placed the lens on the suppressed expression of anger in women and its relationship with an environment that designated her role as subordinate. Because of my having been educated in the Argentine culture where I was not a victim of sexism and racism, I could observe in the U.S. the specific cultural restrictions placed on women and the expectations of docility assigned to a model of femininity totally incongruous with the reality of women’s lives. I wanted to give anger against injustice a place among the healthy attributes of persons of any gender and to stimulate its liberation from a yoke of fear and despair. Those differences in the theoretical realm and in our clinical practice were enriching and led to our collaboration in courses and presentations for colleagues and students. Jean became the Director of the Stone Center for Developmental Studies at Wellesley in 1981. Under her direction, the Center opened its doors to researchers and clinicians in a

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new view of creative research since we were all involved in “doing and changing” and not just in “thinking and researching.” Jean was a model of civility and respect of others views: she listened to differences from a position of learning and always found the way to empathize with you. She did not preach empathy, she practiced it. It was that authenticity and congruence in her ideals and behavior that made her efforts so successful. She had “heart” and her generosity with others gained her many friends and followers. She was amazingly free of narcissism and thought her contributions were modest. I remember having to convince her that she had to give a name to her developmental theory. Although I never saw her angry or resentful she was indignant and sometimes frustrated when change was slow and difficult. I was temperamentally quite different from Jean and yet we had a great time together she celebrating my “rabietas” (temper) and my impassioned speeches, I learning from her countenance and tolerance.

In the application of a feminist perspective to our clinical work we both valued the contributions of every one in our fields of psychology, psychiatry and social work as well as the social sciences. She “gave me my voice,” Carol Gilligan said in her memorial and many women colleagues testified to Jean “changing our lives.”

Jean and her group moved further away from psychoanalysis than I did but we remained closely attached to the main goals: to evolve a manner of understanding women in the cultural context and device treatment approaches that revised old assumptions, specially the “doctor-patient relationship.”

It was Jean who alerted me to the possibility of a sabbatical as an Associate at the famous psychoanalytic training ground for object relations and British psychoanalysis, the Tavistock Clinic, where I attempted my own integration of object relations and other relational views of psychoanalysis and the analysis of culture. Jean and her Stone Center Group moved decisively in the depathologizing of the relational capacities of women and together we collaborated in presenting many courses, papers, panels and discussions at the American Psychiatric Association, the American Orthopsychiatric Association, the American Group Psychotherapy Association, and the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry. This latter organization gathered and sheltered psychiatrists like us, and unlike the American Psychoanalytic Association it welcomed feminists and the dynamic analysis of culture including women’s issues in courses and papers in the yearly program.

We gradually succeeded in getting a cadre of activists, including Judith Herman, to the Committee on Women of the APA and worked there to introduce reforms and new perspectives that could put us in a position of influence on the issues of diagnosis of women. Jean and I were corresponding and sharing information about innovations in teaching and administration. The series of working papers published by The Stone Center broke away with the customary tendency to select a small group of contributors and involved a larger number of psychotherapists and activists in their publications. They became an exciting forum of diffusion and discussion of new work and new approaches, spreading hope and instruction on how to conduct the treatment of women to preserve and develop their relational talents, giving hope a voice to this silent majority, evolving theory while testing practice.

While I was active on the Admissions committee of my medical school in Michigan and on the Advisory Committee of the Provost in increasing opportunities for women and minorities, Jean was the Director of Education at the Stone Center. In ten years the picture had changed enormously and the efforts of thousands of women made that possible, leading to an inspiring new sense of selfhood in a sustaining community.

Along with others we parted company with APA after a battle over diagnostic labels for women we viewed as biased and unscientific. We concentrated our energies on our local communities. Jean was the founder with several of us of the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute at Wellesley. In my community I joined an exciting group of psychologists, psychoanalysts and feminists in founding a new psychoanalytic institute—the Michigan Psychoanalytic Council in 1989. Despite our local interests, we maintained connections, Jean presenting in our Institute and I by becoming a member of the Board of the Wellesley Centers for Women, supporting the base of financial sustenance for their developing institute.

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The last time I saw Jean in 2005, she was in delicate health. We reflected and reminisced on times past, on death and illness. It was a moving dialogue. Jean was keenly alive. She remains that way to me: an indelible, numinous presence.

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