Origins of Relational-Cultural Theory

RCT was conceived after the publication in 1976 of Towards a New Psychology of Women by Jean Baker Miller, MD, a traditionally trained psychiatrist. As Miller began her clinical work with women, she began to realize that what she was learning about their lives did not fit into the traditional models of development she had been taught in medical school.
These early observations prompted the ideas in her revolutionary book, including her point that our understanding of much of life had been skewed and was biased because the way we had come to understand “the nature of things” reflected only the stereotypical experiences and developmental patterns of privileged White men, which precluded our potential for understanding the other half of the human species—namely, women—and all the other experiences along the gender continuum including those of marginalized men and people of color.
Miller also named sex role socialization, power, dominance, marginalization, and subordination as overlooked yet essential guiding principles of relationships and traditional models of development and mental health. After the publication of her groundbreaking book, Western psychology was challenged to understand women’s “ways of being” contextually, as well as to understand the impact of privilege, oppression, and marginalization on human development in general in order to deepen and expand our understanding of the nature of all of our lives and our relationship(s) to and with each other. After the publication of her book, Miller, who was residing in the Boston area, decided to meet this challenge by inviting a group of local psychologists—namely, Dr. Judith Jordan, Dr. Alexandra Kaplan, Dr. Irene Stiver, and Dr. Janet Surrey—to begin meeting on Monday nights at her home. The purpose of those Monday night meetings was to collectively begin rethinking how traditional models of human development failed to capture, understand, and articulate the relational experiences of their female clients and to begin constructing an alternative model of women’s development and a new approach to therapy that fit their needs. This small group of women eventually came to be known as the “founding scholars of RCT.”
During this time, Miller was invited to be the first director of a new counseling center, the Stone Center, on the Wellesley College campus, which was named after the parents and family who founded the center to help students like their daughter who had tragically committed suicide. Under Miller’s directorship, the Stone Center became the source of many scholarly works that have been published through the years, the earliest of which were the fruits of those Monday night meetings. Because the development of their ideas was framed as “a growing understanding” of relationships, their writings emerged into a collection of papers called “Works in Progress” to which nearly 100 diverse scholars and clinicians have contributed over the years.
At the time the founding scholars began their Monday night meetings, the most prevalent theme in theories of human development in Western psychology was that of individualism demonstrated through a consistent focus on the “self.” Ideal self-development and emotional maturity were characterized by individuation, separation, autonomy, rationality, and independence and also required a practice of resisting the influence of others through a degree of unresponsiveness. Being responsive indicated a lack of control of one’s self and of others and signified weakness and a loss of power-over by having “given in” to dependency needs.
From the perspective of “self-development,” it appeared that men had been doing a much better job at achieving developmental milestones than women, who seemed to struggle with definitive self-interests and their personal identities, which they could not seem to manage independent of “relationships.” Miller had elaborated in her book that many of the activities central to a woman’s life and to her identity involved tending to the needs and to the psychological growth and development of others, including men. Along those same lines, traditional models of development failed to address the relational and emotional support men received in pursuit of individual accomplishments and, in turn, neglected the reality of this aspect of their development. As a result, the founding scholars found that a contextual and relational conceptualization of human development would enable a deeper understanding of all of life and laid the foundation for a new approach to therapy, now known as “relational-cultural theory.”