Remembering Clara

When I entered the White Institute in 1951, Clara Thompson was its primary luminary and spokesperson. Sullivan had died in 1949 while attending a meeting in Paris. Erich Fromm had moved to Mexico City where he started his eponymous institute. I do not know how much his teachings there were devoted to his own work and how much to an interpersonal psychoanalytic perspective. He did, however, come frequently to New York, and I did have the opportunity to attend his classes and group supervision. I had personal supervision with Clara for several years and consider her the major influence on my thinking at that time. After she died in 1958, the Institute nearly collapsed until it was rescued by Earl Witenberg's directorship that—albeit authoritarian—brought us to our present building and renown.

Clara's major influences were, of course, Freud, Sullivan, and Ferenczi, and she taught an amalgam of these sometimes incompatible masters. From Freud came a relatively neutral, nonintrusive approach, and a belief in the reality and clinical relevance of the unconscious in both participants. On one occasion, she said to me that “the trouble with some White [Institute] people is that they don't believe in the unconscious!” From Ferenzci came her great respect for the integrity of the patient, for symptoms as partial solutions, and for a deep-felt egalitarianism. From Sullivan came the importance of contagious anxiety and the relevance of the patient's sociocultural matrix.† Perhaps Fromm was an important reinforcement of Sullivan's emphasis on the real life of the patient in a manifest world. Of course, Clara brought her unique talents to bear: most

striking, her strong sense of women's issues and the fluidity of gender (Thompson, 1953) in what was still then a male dominated and defined world.

I'd like to add a few more personal observations. Clara was a friendly, ben