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When Dr. Clara Mabel Thompson died on December 20, 1958, at the age of 65, she had, over the span of her adult life, been an active, if not a founding member, of at least six psychoanalytic organizations on the East Coast of the United States. Beginning in 1930, when she served as the first President of the Washington-Baltimore Psychoanalytic Society, and culminating as the first Director of The William Alanson White Institute in 1943, she worked tirelessly to advance the cause of psychoanalysis in general, to develop and teach the core principles of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, and to consolidate and professionalize psychoanalytic training. As integral as she is to the development of Interpersonal Analysis, I've come to appreciate her ideas as kindred to Analytical Psychology. Her observations about analytic training institutes are as relevant today to Jungian training institutes as they were to the White Institute at the time, and her commentary on Jung is a candid appraisal of an analytic approach that was both familiar and foreign to her. She saw something valuable in Jung's theories and, thanks to Ann D'Ercole's two-volume biography, I have found great value in hers.
Her influence on modern psychoanalysis as well as on psychoanalytic training institutes rivals the impact of Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney, and others who are regularly taught as part of the canon in psychoanalytic training. Given this, it is fair to ask: Why has the name of a person so central to the articulation and dissemination of the tenets and teaching of interpersonal psychoanalysis in the US remained obscure? The answer likely lies as much in Thompson's being written out of history, as so many women have been, as in her own personality. D'Ercole describes that personality as one of “compulsive humility” (2023b, 218). As a theoretician and clinician, Thompson was not inclined to promote herself, but as D'Ercole writes, “…
she is interested in the promotion of ideas” (2023b, 134). Her