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I am grateful to Donnel Stern for deciding that Clara Thompson's 1955 talk deserved to be published and for giving me the opportunity to respond to Thompson's view of the history of the White Institute. As I read Thompson's talk, I became acutely aware of the limitations of near history, or perhaps the limitations of any single participant's narrative truth. Each talk and article, each product of human thought, is a reflection of both the creator's own psychology and the psychosocial historical context in which it was produced. My reading of Thompson's paper reflects my biases and influences as well as the current historical moment.
I have the privilege of a longer and broader perspective on the history described here by Thompson, even if I lack a first-person experience of the events she describes. My perspective is informed by both my earlier research on the history of feminism and interpersonal theory (Shapiro, 2002) as well as by the work of historians of psychoanalysis (Bergmann, 1983, 2011; Cushman, 1995; Eckardt, 1988, 2005; Goggin, Goggin, & Hill, 2004; Hale, 1995; King & Steiner, 1991; Kirsner, 2000; Nathan, 2015), and biographical work (Allen, 1995; Blechner, 2005; Friedman, 2013; Hornstein, 2000; Paris, 1994; Perry, 1982; Quinn, 1987; Shapiro, 1993; Wake, 2008, 2011). Thus, I am conscious not only of the historical forces at play when the White Institute was formed and the personalities involved, but also—given the sea change in attitudes towards women, sexuality in
general, and homosexuality in particular—I am freer to consider the impact of issues that were too dangerous or taboo for Thompson to consider openly in 1955.
In the 1940s and 1950s, American psychoanalysts and their patients often kept a great many secrets. If analysts were physicians and trained lay analysts, they and their patients and students had to keep it secret from the official psychoanalytic institutes. If they or their patients currently or in the past had left-wing sympathies, both