Judith V. Jordan

Judith V. Jordan, Ph.D. is the co-director and a founding scholar of the Jean Baker Miller Institute and co-director of the Institute's Working Connections Project. She is an attending psychologist at McLean Hospital and Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Harvard Medical School. She is the recipient of the Massachusetts Psychology Associations' Career Achievement Award for "Outstanding Contributions to the Advancement of Psychology as a Science and a Profession and she received American Psychological Association's division 29 "distinguished psychologist award." Jordan founded the Women's Studies Program and Women's Treatment Network at McLean Hospital and served as its first director. She works as a psychotherapist, supervisor, teacher and consultant. She is the author of Relational-Cultural Therapy, co-author of Women's Growth in Connection, editor of Women's Growth in Diversity, The Complexity of Connection, the Power of Connection and has published many "Works in Progress" at Wellesley College as well as chapters and journal articles. In addition, Jordan has written, lectured and conducted workshops nationally and internationally on the subjects of Relational-Cultural Theory, women's psychological development, empathy, mutuality, mutual empathy, courage, shame, relational resilience, psychotherapy with women, a relational model of self, relational psychotherapy, gender issues in psychotherapy, relationships between women and men, the mother-daughter and mother-son relationships, special treatment programs for women and treating post-traumatic stress.

Jordan's work to develop and apply Relational-cultural therapy has served as a foundation for other scholars who have used this theory to explore the workplace, education. leadership and entrepreneurship.

Jordan grew up in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. In school, Jordan was excluded from safety patrol and shop class in middle school (privileges reserved for boys), but she was encouraged by her mother to fight the exclusion Attended Abbot Academy (now Phillips Andover Academy) for high school because she had excellent grades and was not being challenged in her small rural school system . Jordan struggled with overwhelming homesickness and was shamed into believing that if she couldn’t “separate from home, [she] wouldn’t be able to succeed at anything” from school authorities The school determined that Jordan should see a therapist, which was her initial introduction to the profession of psychology, and while this relationship was important, it did not deconstruct Jordan’s internalized belief that she had to separate from the people that she loved in order to “be successful” Her interest in the power of connection found its roots in her own struggle to stay connected with important people in a world that told her that was a sign of "weakness". At Brown University she studied Psychology, and she got her Ph.D. from Harvard University, where she studied child development, clinical psychology and wrote her dissertation on how a competitive context interrupts girls' achievement behaviors. As a young faculty and clinician at Harvard Medical School, she began to write about the limitations of a "separate self" model of development and looked at the ways in which empathy provides an experiential sense of connection and compassion.

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