Mary Pipher

Mary Elizabeth Pipher (born October 21, 1947), also known as Mary Bray Pipher, is an American clinical psychologist and author. Her books include A Life in Light: Meditations on Impermanence (2022)^[1] and Women Rowing North (2019), a book on aging gracefully.^{[2] [3]} Prior to that, she wrote The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture (2013) and the bestseller Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1994).

Pipher received a Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1969 and a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 1977. She was a Rockefeller Scholar in Residence at Bellagio in 2001. She received two American Psychological Association Presidential Citations. She returned the one she received in 2006 as a protest against the APA's acknowledgment that some of its members participate in controversial interrogation techniques at Guantánamo Bay and at US "black sites".^[4]

Pipher participates actively in Nebraska state legislature and voices her opinion through letters to the editor of the Lincoln Journal Star . She wrote an essay for The New York Times about the difficulty of Nebraska's mixed political views and need for more progressive politicians. She strongly opposes the Keystone XL Pipeline^[5] and supported the Nebraska Legislative Bill 802, the purpose of which was to create a state task force to combat climate change, calling it "an opportunity to educate and work through problems relating to climate change."^[6]

As of 2019^[update] she resides in Lincoln, Nebraska.^[7]

Pipher is best known for a book she wrote in 1994, introducing the terms Ophelia complex or Ophelia syndrome, in Reviving Ophelia . There she argued for a view of Shakespeare's character of Ophelia in Hamlet as lacking inner direction and externally defined by men,^[8] and suggested that similar external pressures were currently faced by post-pubescent girls.^[9] The danger of the Ophelia syndrome was that of abandoning a rooted childhood self, for an apparently more sophisticated but over-externalized façade self.^[10]

Reviving Ophelia 25th Anniversary Edition: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls is a revised and updated book co-written with Dr. Pipher's daughter, Sara Gilliam.

• Another Country: Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Our Elders
• Letters to a Young Therapist
• The Middle of Everywhere: The World's Refugees Come to our Town
• Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1994, 2019) New York Times best seller for over three years^[11]
• The Shelter of Each Other: Rebuilding Our Families to Enrich Our Lives (1997) New York Times best seller^[12]
• Writing to Change the World (2006)
• Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World (2009)
• The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in our Capsized Culture (2013)
• Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing As We Age (2019)
• A Life in Light: Meditations on Impermanence (2022)

• The Official Website of Mary Pipher, Ph.D.

• 1947 births
• Living people
• American psychology writers
• Writers from Lincoln, Nebraska
• University of Nebraska–Lincoln alumni
• 21st-century American women writers
• American women non-fiction writers
• 21st-century American non-fiction writers

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