Thompson and Sullivan

IT IS FITTING IN THIS twentieth anniversary year of the death of Clara M. Thompson to recognize and pay homage to her pioneering work in psychoanalysis and to her long lasting friendship and collaboration with Harry Stack Sullivan. Her paper, Sullivan and Psychoanalysis, deserves its reprinting here.1 Sullivan was, uniquely, her mentor, and for a short time, her patient. They met about 1925 when she was a protege of the eminent Adolf Meyer. Clara, in her typical New England conscientiousness, was working hard presenting a patient at a staff conference to which the famous Sullivan had been invited to attend. She had a fever of 103°F and Sullivan was immediately attracted to her.

At that time Meyer (who had preserved the American Psychoanalytic Association from being dissolved by William Alanson White in 1919) had become embittered over the political attempts of Freud and his group in Vienna to dominate and control psychoanalysis in America. When Meyer found out that Clara was seeking psychoanalytic treatment he dismissed her from his service. However, she found great comfort and encouragement in Sullivan, who supported her efforts to become independent and seek psychoanalytic training in Budapest. Sullivan had already vainly tried to have Ferenczi brought to Washington, but William Alanson White adamantly refused, implying that such visitors were mainly after money. So in 1928 he was helpful to her in her decision to go to Budapest and study with Sandor Ferenczi, with the understanding that she in turn would analyze Sullivan, so the story goes. This was shortly after Ferenczi began his new technique of a kind of corrective emotional experience which he called relaxation