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It seems to be an extraordinary moment, a moment of resonance and revisiting, for this journal to publish Clara Thompson's 1955 address to the Harry Stack Sullivan Society, the candidate group at White. Reading a paper not generated from a computer, in old familiar typescript, bearing the particular look of manuscripts from the mid-20th century, I tumbled to the past and back to the present again, in an often very unsettling way. Thompson's lecture should come with a WARNING: This article may produce Nachträglichkeit, a well-known psychoanalytic disorder in which time is made nonlinear and we rethink both what happened and what is now happening. Common symptoms: vertigo and dissociation. Best treatment: thinking and feeling one's way toward new ideas and integrations.
Trying not to psychoanalyze this gifted writer and psychoanalytic pioneer, I do wonder at the outset, after an admiring and congratulatory introduction, why Thompson gets caught up in a meditative riff on big and little. She asks, perhaps somewhat anxiously: Can she speak about belonging? Is she up to the demanding title of her talk? Can we answer that question here and now? Who else could write such a lecture?
From the beginning of this article, I have felt mindful that this is an extraordinary voice. By her own description, sometimes heretical, sometimes determined keeper of the flame, sometimes score settling, Thompson does what we have all done in this field, namely to write a birth narrative. Sometimes it's a story of migration and exile, sometimes of arrival and triumph, sometimes both. We start the story somewhere and where we start is a powerful organizing force to where we go and how we tell the story.
Thompson begins with the wish or intention to deal separately with the scientific and metapsychological aspects of our theories/psychoanalysis on the one hand, and the history of becoming heretics on the other. It's a wonderful hope. First, she says, I will do due diligence and anchor us in theor