The healing connection

by Jean Baker Miller

Many popular psychology books imply that women are too dependent on their relationships with others. In The Healing Connection, Jean Baker Miller, M.D., author of the best-selling Toward a New Psychology of Women, and Irene Pierce Stiver, Ph.D., argue that the value women often attach to relationships is not misplaced: Relationships are in fact the source of psychological health. The Healing Connection points to ways of interacting on relationships - whether with family members, friends and colleagues, or therapists - that lead to successful growth and development. Through vivid examples drawn from their own practice as therapists, Miller and Stiver show how women can learn to experience real connection and to overcome psychological problems. They also outline a new kind of psychotherapy in which the therapist is not a neutral figure, but a participant with emotional responses of her own.