Thompson, Clara M(abel)

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THOMPSON, Clara M(abel)

Born 3 October 1893, Providence, Rhode Island; died 20 December 1958, New York, New York

Daughter of T. Franklin and Clara Medberry Thompson

Clara M. Thompson graduated from the Women's College of Brown University and began her medical training at Johns Hopkins University in 1916. It had at one time been her ambition to become a medical missionary, but at Johns Hopkins her interest in psychoanalysis intensified. After her internship at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, Thompson completed her residency in psychiatry at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins in 1925.

Thompson's career was varied and its course inextricably linked to changes occurring in the field of psychoanalysis as the culturally oriented analysts challenged many of the Freudian theories to which the classical psychotherapists ascribed. After establishing a private practice, teaching at Vassar and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and studying at Budapest with Sandor Ferenczi, Freud's pupil and colleague, Thompson, along with other proponents of the cultural approach to psychoanalysis, formed the American Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. Thompson was elected vice president. With others, she established the William Alanson White Institute in New York in 1943. As its executive director for many years, she provided the leadership that allowed the institute to preserve its ideal of open scientific investigation.

Although Thompson published over 50 papers, articles, reviews, and interviews, the works which make her most accessible to the lay reader are three books, only one of which was published during her lifetime. Psychoanalysis: Evolution and Development (1950) is a study of the major trends and developments in psychoanalysis. Thompson builds her discussion of the most significant theories of Freud, Adler, Jung, Ferenczi, Sullivan, Fromm, and others on the thesis that a thread of continuity runs through the evolution of psychoanalysis, even as it develops in divergent directions. No polemicist, Thompson approaches this study as a reconciler whose perspective is based on the belief that it is premature to assume any one school of psychoanalysis has discovered final truth.

Interpersonal Psychoanalysis: The Selected Papers of Clara M. Thompson (1964) is addressed primarily to a professional audience. The selections in the first two-thirds of the book deal with changing concepts in psychoanalysis, the contributions of Ferenczi, Sullivan, and Fromm, and various clinical problems in psychotherapy. The last portion of the work contains professional articles and an uncompleted manuscript on the psychology of women. This material has been edited a second time and presented for a more popular audience under the title On Women (1971).

In her exploration in these two books of what might be called "female distinctiveness," Thompson is interested in the extent to which the basic experiences that set women apart from men affect their essential makeup. She is sufficiently Freudian to acknowledge the impact of woman's biological distinctiveness on her role in life, but she differs with Freud over the degree of biologic determinism. Many of the characteristics which Freud saw as being innate in the female Thompson attributes to cultural factors, and she imputes the preponderance of distorted ideas about the female psychosexual life to the unavoidable bias of male theorists.

Thompson credits Freud with having developed the most comprehensive and detailed theories about women, but she opposes his view that a woman is essentially a castrated male. Thompson insists that a woman's psychology is "something in its own right and not merely a negation of maleness;" she was one of the very early psychoanalytic theorists to insist many of the "truths" about the innate nature of women have to be examined in light of the culture that has defined the woman, and she was one of the pioneers in asserting that the female experience has an inherent validity of its own.

In her contributions to the literature of psychoanalysis, Thompson was both evaluator and originator. She assessed the work of others in the field from the perspective of one capable of realizing continuity in divergence. In her own divergence from the classical psychoanalytic concepts, Thompson provided new ways of looking at human problems. Her theories concerning the impact of culture on the psychosexual development of women foreshad-owed many of the perspectives on women which only emerged in popular literature after her death in 1958.