Judith Victoria Jordan PhD

Judith V. Jordan, Ph.D. is the Director of the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute, a legacy project at the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW). She has been a founding scholar and is one of the creators of the nationally recognized psychological theory known as Relational-Cultural Theory. In addition to her Senior Scholar position at WCW, Dr. Jordan is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from Brown University, she earned her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Harvard University where she received a commendation for outstanding academic performance. She was the director of Psychology Training as well as the director of the Women's Studies program at McLean Hospital. For over 20 years she has worked with her colleagues, the late Jean Baker Miller, the late Irene Stiver, and Jan Surrey on the development of what has come to be known as the relational-cultural model of development.

Dr. Jordan authored the book Relational-Cultural Therapy in 2010 as part of the American Psychological Association's "Theories of Psychotherapy" series. Dr. Jon Carlson, series co-editor, lauded Relational-Cultural Theory as "One of the ten most important psychological theories today." Judy co-authored the book Women's Growth in Connection and edited Women's Growth in Diversity, The Complexity of Connection, and The Power of Connection. She has published over forty original reports (many as works in progress at the Stone Center) and twenty-five chapters and has been co-author of three books.

Dr. Jordan believes the existing structures of psychology characterized by a separate-self model of development are destructive to women and the fabric of the community for all people. By carefully studying women's lives and women's struggles, she is creating new models of human development that hopefully will help transform the destructive social impact of competition, hyper-individualism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism. The practice of mutual empathy is directly related to the promotion of social justice, as is the belief that growth fostering connections is at the core of human development. While most of her early work arose in the context of the practice of psychotherapy, increasingly she is applying this work to organizations and to social change.