Abstract
This Changes Everything, written by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Christina Robb, represents the culmination of 10 years of intimate access to three of America's major feminist psychology theorists. The lives and work of Carol Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller, and Judith Lewis Herman are featured in what is a compelling and inspiring story about persistence in the face of discrimination, giving voice to the oppressed in the name of justice, and the transformative power of community and social action. Robb paints a picture of the stark reality of women's exclusion from psychological theories about human development, of the effects of subordination under a “politics of dominance,” and of the collective silence about the pervasiveness and damaging sequelae of incest. Robb fleshes out each of these areas with the political history of Gilligan's, Miller's, and Herman's ideas and provides a detailed account of their theories, research projects, personal networks, and grassroots initiatives. In doing so, Robb gives readers a rich context and deep appreciation for the incredible contributions made by these women and their colleagues. More than this, the book is about relationships—what factors foster connection and growth, what factors create distance and injury, and what pathways support repair and healing. There is a strong feminist analysis throughout, with attention to aspects of race, class, and sexuality.
The project's ambitiousness is also its downfall. Robb attempts to speak to too many audiences and topics (e.g., women's gender socialization, important elements of healthy relationships, discrimination in academia, the trauma field and its early history and major debates). The book flows rather loosely and sometimes becomes disjointed. A strong road map for readers at each chapter's start and embedded within its structure is sorely lacking and as I read I often had to remind myself of the point being made. Casting the net widely results in a limited depth of examination of some issues. This ambition, in combination with perhaps being too long in the making, led me to conclude that I had not learned anything particularly new, except for gaining an inside (and sometimes gossipy) look at the personal lives of Robb's subjects in her review of their life works. Furthermore, a danger in trying to cover too much material is a simplistic analysis, in which, at times, Robb seemed to idealize and essentialize women and women's relationships. In this overarching context, however, some of the book's most exciting moments include her references to White women confronted with their racism, mothers who failed to protect their daughters from abusive men, and Lyn Brown's work on “betrayal and rejection among girls,” in which women suddenly felt more dimensional and alive.
The book also disappoints in that it fails to fully deliver on the promise of its title. Beyond the fact that there is no discussion about the contributions of feminist psychologists other than those who are the subject of this book, most undermining for Robb's argument about a “relational revolution” is the incomplete historical narrative about the evolution of psychological thought leading to these relational theories. Within the realm of psychotherapy and analysis, my sense is that Robb may have been trying to return some of the credit to feminist psychology for bringing a relational view and crucial insights about the co-constructed nature of exchanges into clearer focus for today's relational analysts. The book's fundamental problem, however, is that there exists a completely encapsulated story not described by Robb that gives a perfectly coherent and compelling account of this evolution without the contributions of feminist psychology. For Robb's argument to be at all convincing, she needed to lay out the existing history to demonstrate where and when feminist psychology played a role in turning the tides. This history, missing in Robb's text, begins with Freud's notion of drive conflicts, takes us to Erikson's ego conflicts, and then to the object relations theories of Fairbairn, Klein, and Kernberg—all of which represent intrapsychic, one-person models whereby interpersonal material emerging in therapy is perceived as solely a byproduct of the patient's transference. Kohut represents a turn in thinking with his self-psychology theory, introducing the idea that analyst and patient have a real relationship with one another. This in turn gave way to intersubjective, two-person approaches: first, the interpersonal theories of Sullivan and Horney who positioned the analyst as a participant/observer and, later, the relational psychoanalytic models of Mitchell, Bromberg, Davies, and the Pizers, who emphasized internal process as one that shapes and is shaped by the other. Although Robb ends the book by discussing this relational approach of mutual influence, she makes only cursory mention of a number of the above theorists (other than Freud). The book I had hoped for was one that carefully traced the missing lineage and integrated it into her presumed thesis. I think that such a book would have brought more cohesion to the text and significantly raised its level of scholarship.
This Changes Everything is a book that follows a relational theme through the lives and work of three Boston women who became prominent countercultural theorists in the field of psychology and changed it forever. It is a book accessible to the public and is relevant to anyone with general interests in any one of the theorists and her contributions to psychology, the study of gender, and/or the study of trauma. Particular chapters could be used in a psychology of women or gender class and could be of equal use to people simply desiring closer connections in their lives.