Obituary Notice: Clare Wright Thompson

Clare Wright was born in 1912 on the first day of May, the day of the festival celebration of spring, the time of rebirth of nature. And she died in 1980 in the fall, the time when nature dies. In the 68 intervening years she devoted herself courageously to each personal task that life presented to her, shirking neither inner nor outer responsibilities. At the same time, she enriched the lives of the many with whom she came in contact. She made each of us feel as if we were special to her, as indeed I am sure each of us was.

Clare's life and mine initially came together in September 1939, when I was dejectedly leaving the Psychology Department on my first day at Stanford, having been told that all offices for graduate students had been assigned to earlier comers. Clare came running after me to ask if I would like to share an office with her and another graduate student. I came to learn that this kind of thoughtfulness and generosity was typical of Clare—responding not only to one's expressed needs, but to her observation of them.

So I knew Clare as a fellow graduate student (at one of our trio picnic lunches before the written examination Clare pleaded, ‘Let's read something humorous out loud instead of asking each other test questions’); as wives of advertising executives who were best friends; as co-authors (a book on Readings in Analytical Psychology, which was not picked up by any of the publishers we approached—perhaps it was ahead of its time); as copanellists (Clare titled the panel on C. G. Jung she was asked to chair at the American Psychological Association meeting in Montreal: ‘Young Man Old—Old Man Young’); as co-teachers (a series of seminars on Jung which Clare was invited to give at the University of Minnesota); as travellers together (the most memorable: the Vancouver to San Francisco leg of a freighter trip that was to take Clare to Europe); as senior colleagues (Clare's awareness and reflections added to the positive side of growing older). A similar