Note From Director
Judy Jordan, Ph.D.
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December 2009
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Dear Friends, 
Our
first newsletter was greeted enthusiastically by many of you. We look
forward to this ongoing contact with you. And for those of you who
shared some of your work with us, thanks. However we have had some
glitches with our email list, so if you know of someone who might want
to receive this letter and hasn't, please forward this to them so they
may subscribe to receive future E-Connections. We want to use technology to make connections, not break them!
We
held our annual Healing Connections Institute this past weekend--
formerly called the Fall Institute (see special report with photos.) It
was well attended, with 43 people gathered in our own Stone Center
Solarium. On Friday night, Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D. gave the third Jean Baker Miller Memorial Lecture on her new book So Sexy, So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids.
A great crowd turned out for that, including Jean Baker Miller's
husband Mike, her dear friend Alice Levine, her son Jon, his wife
Myriam and their son Jake. It meant a lot to us to have them with us.
It was a spectacular evening and I wish you all could have been there.
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Healing Connection
Pam Birrell Ph.D.
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 Being Crazy Eddie
I
first met Charles when I was working at a Community Mental Health
Center in a very impoverished area of a large city. It was an agency
that provided services including social work, case management,
psychotherapy, and psychiatry. Charles' mother had called the clinic
about her son who at the time was 30 years old and hadn't left the
house since he was 13. In addition to being agoraphobic Charles was
angry, depressed and increasingly difficult for her to manage.
Before
I met Charles for psychotherapy, he had met with a social worker who
helped him leave the house for the first time in all those years. She
also went with him to do things like get his hair cut and go to the
grocery store. When she brought him to the clinic he was frightened and
overwhelmed, and he covered it with a layer that alternated between icy
cold condescension and depressed hopelessness.
Top
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Living Connections
Maureen Walker, Ph.D.
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 All in the Family?
Some
questions just are electric: they charge the air with the tension of
challenge and possibility. Such was the atmosphere in the science
center lecture hall during the Jean Baker Miller Memorial Lecture. The
auditorium was filled to capacity, and Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D.
held an audience of parents, educators, and mental health professionals
in rapt attention as she presented evidence of pervasive and insidious
exploitation of children's sexuality in contemporary market culture.
Using material from her latest work So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids.
Kilbourne guided her adult audience through the morass of sex-saturated
images designed specifically to captivate the imaginations, the hopes -
the brains of young people.
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Making Connections Around The Globe
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 Exciting things are happening in Europe
Connie
Gunderson provided updates about recent curricular developments at the
University of Applied Sciences, Bremen and at the Alice Saloman
Hochschule in Berlin. This past October Connie and her colleague Alice
Muller met with Judy Jordan, Ph.D and Amy Banks, M.D.
to explore a cooperative working relationship with the goal of
introducing RCT to college level academia - an environment in which
psychoanalytic thinking has long been dominant. At the Alice Saloman
Hochschule, Amy Banks held an international video conference I November
2009 to teach Bachelor Level students "How Relationships Heal:
Exploring Neurobiology."
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Research Forum
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 Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT)
has
been applied to nursing science and academia in several theory-based
articles and qualitative research studies. Olshansky (2003) used RCT as
an explanation for vulnerability to depression among previously
infertile mothers. An especially at risk population for the development
of depression, women with previous infertility often experience
repeated and sustained interferences with significant relationships, as
well as a profound rejection, or silencing, of important aspects of
one's self.
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How Connections Heal: Founding Concepts and Recent Developments in Relational-Cultural Theory and Practice
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 Special Report
What
an exciting three days it was! Forty-three people - from as nearby as
Wellesley and as far away as Germany- gathered in the Stone Center
Solarium over an October weekend for the introductory RCT institute.
The first session, "Working with the Power of Connection", was co-led
by Judy Jordan, Ph.D and Maureen Walker, Ph.D. On Friday evening, Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D.
delivered the Jean Baker Miller Memorial Lecture to a "standing room
only" audience in the Wellesley Science Center. (See Living Connections
article.)
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The Jean Baker Miller Training Institute is a program of:
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