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In 1945, the war was over, but its aftermath was still being felt. Thousands of servicemen had been killed in the war and men, women, and children were killed in the Blitz. Europe was awash with parentless children.
The British Psychoanalytical Society was still reeling from its own internal battles. Some of these conflicts were about its structure, but there was a more poisonous one between Melanie Klein and Anna Freud, who was now a refugee from Vienna. The mixture was stirred by Klein's daughter, Melitta Schmideberg, who likened the Kleinians to Goebbels. The situation was saved by the psychoanalyst and educator, Susan Isaacs. She gave a brilliant paper linking the ideas of Freud and Klein. At the end of the war, the Society had its first female president, Sylvia Payne. Payne organised the “Ladies agreement” which created separate streams for Kleinian and Freudian candidates. Although disagreements rumbled on, some psychoanalysts felt able to turn their attention to the external world.
In 1945, The New Era Fellowship magazine decided to devote a whole issue to the bringing-up of children during and after the war. Susan Isaacs was asked to write about fatherless children. She persuaded her former analyst Joan Riviere to write about the bereaved wife. Tall, beautiful, and brilliant, Riviere was the analyst of Bowlby and Winnicott. She had organised the defence of Melanie Klein, her closest friend. However, 1945 was a tragic year for her. Her husband, Evelyn Riviere had died of cancer of the liver and stomach. His death brought back painful memories of the death of her father, Hugh Verrall, who had died in 1909. This earlier death plunged Riviere into a depression which, in the longer run, brought her to psychoanalysis.
Isaacs must have intended this task as a therapeutic one for Riviere. However, the psychoanalytic world was in a sense mourning the death of its own father, Sigmund Freud, who had died in freedom in England, in 1939. He and Evelyn Riviere were both buri