[3][4] Gergen grew up on the plains of southwestern Minnesota, and later moved with her family to St. Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis.
in English and Education with a minor in speech and theatre at the University of Minnesota, where she was elected Phi Beta Kappa.
Gergen began her teaching career at Penn State, Brandywine in 1984 as an assistant professor in psychology and women's studies.
In the early 1990s, she was one of the seven founders of The Taos Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to the development of social constructionist ideas within diverse practice areas, including therapy, organizational consulting, and education.
Mary Gergen traveled internationally to give lectures and workshops and served on examination committees and as an external examiner for Ph.D. theses from many countries, in addition to supervising several doctoral dissertations and teaching in a theoretical psychology program at Massey University, NZ.
Her attempt, at the outset, was to develop an alternative in studies of gender to both the hegemonic empiricist mode and the feminist standpoint orientation.
Gergen has also been innovating in developing a field of performative psychology, in which dramatic presentations are featured as a way of both carrying out research and communicating with peers and public.