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March 15, 1955 for the Harry Stack Sullivan Society
Introduction: Our speaker this evening is Dr. Clara Thompson, who is the Executive Director of the William Alanson White Institute, and who needs very little introduction, I think. Her subject is “The William Alanson White Institute—Its Place in the Development of Psychoanalysis.” Familiarity with an experience in psychoanalysis in this country and in Europe, I think, and in her own significant role in the development of psychoanalysis, particularly well qualifies her.
CLARA THOMPSON: When I saw the impressive title that I had absent-mindedly given to this speech, my compulsive modesty got very disturbed because I think I am undertaking a pretty big job to say where we really belong in the psychoanalytic field. Nevertheless, I do want to try to fit us into the picture, and I thought I would take it up in two parts: the first part merely as a gesture towards science, that is, what is our place in the evolution of theory and technique? And, I would like to view that as dispassionately as possible. And then, secondly, I thought we would take up the history of our becoming heretics. Of course, fights in the psychoanalytic world always existed and there has always been a tendency for them to descend to personalities. I am going to try a little bit of that myself, to begin with, by saying that I think psychoanalysis is an unusually incestuous specialty. The father-son situation or the mother-son situation is very strong in our whole field and the difficulty that sons
have had getting free from these fathers has punctuated the whole history of psychoanalysis. Either the tendency is to submit and be a good son or be rebellious. Now, these rebellious sons have been told so in just so many terms many times, and Freud was the one who started this insidious custom. I am sure you have read enough of the literature to know that when Adler disagreed with him, he said that Adler's difficulty was that he was a short man; therefore h