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Dr. Ann D'Ercole has done a great service to Interpersonal-Relational psychoanalysis and to the William Alanson White Institute in writing this exhaustive two-volume biography of Clara Mabel Thompson, MD. D'Ercole resoundingly establishes Thompson's place in the history of American psychoanalysis and brings her alive for several generations of clinicians, especially beneficial as her scholarly work is difficult to find online or in print. Richly detailed and meticulously researched in the oral history tradition, D'Ercole used interviews, archives, Thompson's academic articles, and personal correspondence to prepare this long overdue biography/analysis of Thompson's scholarly contributions to psychoanalysis.
Why was Thompson so pivotal? She was a maverick both personally and professionally, a groundbreaking feminist and theorist of female psychology, and a member of the Cultural school. She disseminated many of Ferenczi's ideas to the American audience, led several early psychoanalytic organizations, and was cofounder of and first Executive Director of the William Alanson White Institute. While Thompson was an assimilator, not a brilliant theoretical innovator, D'Ercole calls her “the architect of the American Interpersonal Tradition rather than the men (Sullivan and Fromm) who most often receive credit” (D'Ercole, 2023a, p. 3). Is this too bold? Not at all. Thompson melded Fromm and Sullivan's thinking with character analysis and Ferenczi's ideas about analytic interaction to form the unique tradition of Interpersonal psychoanalysis. Before I continue the review, I should note possible bias as I am the current Executive Director of the William Alanson White Institute and Thompson is my analytic “grandmother” through my first training analyst, Benjamin Wolstein.
To call this two-volume set simply a biography would greatly understate what D'Ercole has accomplished. There is something here for almost every reader: Historians of early psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic ins