Jean Baker Miller was a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, social activist, feminist, and author. She wrote "Toward a New Psychology of Women", which brings psychological thought together with relational-cultural theory.
Background
Jean Baker Miller was born on September 29, 1927 in the Bronx in New York City, New York, United States. She was born to a Jewish family. She was diagnosed with polio at an early age, and was inspired to pursue a career in medicine while in the care of nurses.
Education
Miller attended Hunter College High School in New York City and in 1948 graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. She obtained her M.D. from Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1952, and was in New York for psychiatric residency programs at Montefiore Medical Center, Bellevue Hospital Center, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Upstate Medical Center, and New York Medical College, where she completed her psychoanalytic training.
Career
Miller opened a private practice in New York, and then moved to Boston in 1973. She edited "Psychoanalysis and Women" (1973), and then wrote "Toward a New Psychology of Women" (1976). Following the publication of "Toward a New Psychology of Women", Miller became the first director of the Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies at Wellesley College. In 1986, she became the Director of Education for the Stone Center, where she established a group discussion program to share ideas about the relational model and published these ideas as "Working Papers" through the center. In 1991, she co-authored her second book "Women's Growth in Connection".
Miller also served as a clinical professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, and practiced psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In 1995, Jean Baker Miller established the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute (JBMTI) at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College, an organization that seeks to "promote social change by expanding definitions and societal norms of personal strength, human health, and cultural wellbeing. She served as its Founding Director and used the Institute to teach the theory of Relational-Cultural Theory to mental health professionals and nonprofit organizations. Her third book, The Healing Connection, co-authored with Irene Stiver, was published in 1998.
Jean Baker Miller died on July 29, 2006, at the age of 78 due to respiratory failure caused by emphysema and post-polio complications.
Quotations:
"In a basic sense, the greater the development of each individual the more able, more effective, and less needy of limiting or restricting others she or he will be."
"Practically everyone now bemoans Western man's sense of alienation, lack of community, and inability to find ways of organizing society for human ends. We have reached the end of the road that is built on the set of traits held out for male identity-advance at any cost, pay any price, drive out all competitors, and kill them if necessary."
"Conflict is inevitable, the source of all growth, and an absolute necessity if one is to be alive."
Membership
She was a member of the American College of Psychiatrists, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Orthopsychiatric Association and the American Academy of Psychoanalysis.
Connections
She was married to Seymour M. Miller, an emeritus professor of sociology at Boston University. They had two sons, Dr. Edward D. Miller and Jonathan F. Miller, Chairman and CEO of America Online.