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For many older American psychoanalysts, the name of Joan Riviere will first bring to mind her early translations of Freud's writings. At a time when many of us were struggling with the translations of A. A. Brill, commendable though they assuredly were, it was a delight to read the excellent English of Joan Riviere. But she soon became more than a translator, however important that work may have been.
The book begins, after a short foreword by Hanna Segal, with a fine biographical sketch of Riviere by Athol Hughes. It is accompanied by several interesting photographs of the subject. He speaks of a letter of Riviere's that conveys “a vivid impression of Joan's social sensibilities, including her snobbishness and anti-Semitism (a characteristic of Bloomsbury, illustrated in the letters of James and Alix Strachey)” (p. 35). The latter, however, was not so rigidly entrenched as to prevent her from saying about Freud (p. 209) that “His appearance was not typically that of a medical man, nor was it particularly Jewish.” Recent works by Hannah S. Decker (Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900 [1991]) and others describing Austrian anti-Semitism in general, will explain why one could have foreseen not only the rise of Hitler, but also Freud's view that psychoanalysis would have