Clara Thompson—1893-1958

On 20 December last, in the sixty-sixth year of her life, Clara Thompson died of a recurrent malignancy.

She was born in Providence, Rhode Island. Her medical and psychiatric training were obtained in Baltimore, the latter under the auspices of Adolf Meyer. While in Baltimore, where she lived, studied, and practiced for about fifteen years, she met Harry Stack Sullivan, who became her close personal friend during the remainder of his lifetime. He was also, in the early years of this friendship, her principal psychiatric mentor, and it was at his suggestion and urging that she went to Budapest in the early 1930s to undergo psychoanalysis with Sandor Ferenczi. She spent several years there and was working with him even during a part of his terminal illness.

Prior to her analytic work with Ferenczi, she had participated, in 1930, in the founding of the Washington-Baltimore Psychoanalytic Society and became its first President.

Upon returning to this country from Budapest, she settled in New York and lived there until the time of her death. During these twenty-odd years she became a prominent figure in the psychoanalytic world: she made many and varied contributions to the literature of psychoanalysis, chiefly in the areas of the historical development of that discipline and of the psychology of women; she was very active in teaching candidates in psychoanalytic training. She made frequent teaching trips to Washington and Baltimore. She was also a training analyst in the New York Psychoanalytic Institute until her resignation in 1941. Then she taught for two years at the American Institute for Psychoanalysis. She helped to found the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Psychoanalysis, where she was one of the principal instructors and was its Executive Director up to the time of her death. Many psychoanalysts now practicing owe some part of their competence and skill to her efforts with them.

Some time after settling in New York she conti