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With characteristic humility, Clara Thompson once joked that her fate was to be “the first president of something.” This self-
deprecating statement perfectly sums up the little I knew of Thompson before reading this biography. She served as the first president of the Washington-Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute, where I completed my training seventy years after her tenure. At no point during my studies, however, do I ever recall her name being mentioned nor her papers being assigned. In fact, were it not for a photograph of an elderly Thompson appearing on our institute’s website, I doubt I would have been able to pick her out of a lineup (even now it’s easy for me to mistake her for Melanie Klein given their physical likeness). However, after reading Ann D’Ercole’s compelling biography of this true American visionary of psychoanalytic thought, I am hopeful that Clara Thompson may finally get the recognition that often eluded her during her life.
D’Ercole has divided her biography of Thompson into two separate volumes. The first covers Thompson’s early years and emerging professional identity and the second focuses on her intellectual development and legacy as a psychoanalytic thinker and educator. She relies heavily on Clara Thompson’s own voice—drawing on unpublished letters, interviews, analytic writings, as well as the reminiscences of those who were either analyzed or supervised by her. Together, this rich source material helps to flesh out a portrait of a woman who was known to be reserved and often private in her personal life. As D’Ercole writes, “Thompson’s legacy is most palpably felt in her encounters with others” (Vol. 2, p. 260) and the author has gone to some lengths to track down and interview those who knew her intimately.
The first volume entitled, Clara M. Thompson’s Early Years and Professional Awakening, begins with a 1952 interview Thompson granted Kurt Eissler, who at the time was the director and curator of the Sigmund Freud Archives housed