Harriet Lerner, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and a contributor to feminist theory and therapy. From 1972 to 2001 she was a staff psychologist at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas

Kansas

Kansas is a US state located in the Midwestern United States. It is named after the Kansas River which flows through it, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area. The tribe's name is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south...

 and a faculty member and supervisor in the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry. During this time she published extensively on the psychology of women and family relationships, revising traditional psychoanalytic concepts to reflect feminist and family systems perspectives. Her son is the National Book Award

National Book Award

The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...

-nominated poet Ben Lerner

Ben Lerner

Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, and critic. He was awarded the Hayden Carruth prize for his cycle of fifty-two sonnets, . In 2004, Library Journal named it one of the year's twelve best books of poetry...

.

Education

Lerner did her undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin, where she received a government grant to study and pursue independent research in Delhi

Delhi

Delhi , officially National Capital Territory of Delhi , is the largest metropolis by area and the second-largest by population in India, next to Mumbai. It is the eighth largest metropolis in the world by population with 16,753,265 inhabitants in the Territory at the 2011 Census...

, India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

. She received her M.A. in Educational Psychology from Teacher's College of Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 and her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from The City University of New York. She did her predoctoral internship at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco and completed her postdoctoral training at the Menninger Clinic, where she subsequently joined the staff.

Works

Lerner is best known for her general-audience books which provide a framework for understanding and improving family and work relationships.

The Dance of Anger, a New York Times bestseller that has been translated into more than 35 foreign editions, was the first book published in the United States on the subject of female anger. Women in Therapy is a compilation of her professional publications related to female psychology. She is also an award-winning children’s book author with her sister, Susan Goldhor.

Books

• The Dance of Anger, 1985, revised in 2005
• Women in Therapy, 1988
• The Dance of Intimacy, 1989
• The Dance of Deception, 1993
• Life Preservers, 1996
• The Mother Dance, 1998
• The Dance of Connection, 2001
• The Dance of Fear, 2004

Children's books

• What’s So Terrible About Swallowing An Appleseed?, 1996
• Franny B. Kranny, There’s a Bird in Your Hair!, 2001