Annotated Bibliography of Claude Dagmar Daly (1884–1950)

The following bibliography is a supplement to Mary Jane Lupton's essay, “Claude Dagmar Daly: Notes on the Menstruation Complex,” which was published in the Spring 1989 issue of American Imago (1-20). In that essay she looks closely at two of Daly's texts—“The Menstruation Complex in Literature” and “The Role of Menstruation in Human Phylogenesis and Ontogenesis” —in an examination of his now forgotten theories on menstruation. Yet Daly was a prolific essayist, the author of numerous articles which emphasized the role of menstruation in psycho-sexual development—a perspective which has been neglected or ignored by the psychoanalytic institution. This bibliography is intended to give a sense of the scope and chronology of Claude Dagmar Daly's unprecedented work on the menstruation complex and related theories.

Daly was born in New Zealand in 1884 and moved to England when he was five. He later joined the military, spending much of his life in India, where he was exposed to the mythology which would lead him to the menstruation complex. In 1921 he published his first article, “Numbers in Dreams.” There were no books. In 1924 Daly went into an interrupted analysis with Freud; he also had a year of analysis with Sandor Ferenczi. According to John Rickman's obituary of Daly, (International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 31, 1950: 290-91), Daly and Freud corresponded about the menstruation complex, a correspondence that was allegedly destroyed in a hotel fire in London during the Second World War. Rickman also refers to two book manuscripts: Female Sexuality