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I was pleased to discover this collection because I had previously known of Joan Riviere only as the author of her famous 1935 paper, ‘A contribution to the analysis of the negative therapeutic reaction’. I was curious to know what else had been written by the author of such an important paper and to know something of the personality behind the thinking.
This volume consists of her collected papers 1920-1958. Its contents range from short book reviews to full-length psycho-analytic articles. Mrs Riviere's works are prefaced by a long scholarly introduction by Athol Hughes which places her life and works within the psychoanalytic, intellectual and social context of the time. We are given a rounded picture of her socially and professionally; we see her kindness and her astuteness, but also her snobbery and the lack of confidence that underlay this trait. We are also told something of the difficulties, especially about boundaries, in her analysis with Ernest Jones.
The book contains several major papers and it is interesting to follow the development of Riviere's own ideas. ‘Womanliness as a masquerade’ examines how a too perfect adjustment to traditional female roles can be a mask that hides anxiety about the woman's male identification and, especially, about the revenge she fears from both sexes because of her theft, in phantasy, of the penis which is an attack on mother as well as father. The theme of intense oral envy of the parents is developed in her 1932 paper, ‘Jealousy as a mechanism of defence’, where she shows, by close monitoring of the context of her patient's jealous outbursts, that ‘jealousy serves as a more ego-synotic substitute for envy’. Here she anticipates Mrs Klein's later work.