Clara Thompson 1893—1958

Clara Thompson died on December 20, 1958. Typically, she was active professionally until the last two weeks. The daughter of a New England family, she started out in life intend-to become a medical missionary. In her psychiatric training, she worked at Phipps Clinic where she was most highly regarded by Adolf Meyer. In the early Thirties, she went to Budapest and started analysis with Dr. Ferenczi.

With a gift for seeing behind the verbiage of the field, she became one of the important figures in the modification of psychoanalytic thinking. The lucidity and clarity of her style often belied the complicated thinking behind it. She had a wide range of professional interests, as evidenced by her many papers. A tireless clinician, she has many former analysands in many institutes. Her lack of dogmatism is evidenced by the many friends she had in psychoanalytic and psychiatric societies.

Closely associated with Harry Stack Sullivan and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, she was a Fellow of the Washington School of Psychiatry and had been a member of the Board of Trustees of the William Alanson White Foundation since 1943. For years, she made week-end trips to Washington in order to participate in the teaching and training of students there. During the week, she was active in New York as the Executive Director of the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology. She, along with Sullivan, Fromm, Fromm-Reichmann, and Rioch, started this Institute as a successor to the New York Division. Clara Thompson, in her unassuming way, was active as teacher, training analyst, supervising analyst, personal therapist and administrator. She wrote over thirty papers, one book, and edited another in collaboration with Dr. E. Witenberg and Dr. M. Mazer.

With her death, the American psychoanalytic scene has lost one of its more significant figures in the quest for open-mindedness and clarity.