Introduction: The History of the William Alanson White Institute by Clara Thompson

Clara Mabel Thompson, M.D. (18931958), whose photograph appears on page 1, was one of the founders of the William Alanson White Institute in 1946 and served as its first director until her death. She was a political activist in psychoanalysis and one of the first psychoanalytic feminists. Shapiro (2002) describes Thompson and Karen Horney, Thompson's friend and colleague, as the first psychoanalytic feminist theorists. Thompson was also an innovator in other ways, eventually bearing a significant degree of responsibility for the establishment of interpersonal psychoanalysis as a school of thought. Thompson, who knew well both Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm (she was particularly close to Sullivan), two of the other founders of White, saw that Sullivan's interpersonal relations (Sullivan's favored description of his way of thinking) could be combined with Fromm's culturalist orientation, his psychoanalytic views (Fromm was trained at the Berlin Institute), and his existentialist commitment to authenticity and spontaneity in clinical practice to shape what came to be called interpersonal psychoanalysis. It is fitting that the phrase interpersonal psychoanalysis was coined as the title of Thompson's selected papers (Thompson, 1964) by the editor of those papers, Maurice Green. It is surprising to most of us that the phrase should have appeared for the first time at that relatively late date, because it always seemed to have been there. But the fact that it was devised only then underlines the effort that was necessary to forge a school of thought from a group of ideas

that had been present for many years, but not necessarily integrated in a way that made them visible as a psychoanalytic perspective. This effort is reflected in the contributions appearing in the volume