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Clara Thompson was an important figure in the revisionist “cultural school” of psychoanalysis in the 1940s and 1950s, though today she is less well remembered than her culturalist colleagues Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Erich Fromm. All four had discarded the essential Freudian proposition that psychological development is shaped predominantly by instinctual drives; they ascribed the shaping role instead to culture. But Horney, Sullivan, and Fromm were known as original thinkers, while Thompson was thought of primarily as a very capable teacher, clinician, and organizational leader. (She was also esteemed for her personal qualities; colleagues and students of all theoretical persuasions found her to be admirably honest, sincere, conscientious, and warm, if reserved.)
Thompson herself had no pretensions to theoretical innovation; she was content to write astute clinical papers and accessible professional histories in which she credited Horney, Fromm, and Sullivan as the founders of the “cultural school.” Perhaps she was too modest. Clara Thompson was not a brilliant innovator, but neither was she a slavish follower. As a culturalist, she pursued her own questions, developed her own point of view, and produced work apparently designed to supplement and correct certain aspects of the work of her more formidable colleagues.
When Clara Thompson wrote as a culturalist, she wrote about women; with this topic she found an unoccupied niche. Though at first she followed Horney's lead in insisting that what psychoanalysts believed to be universal female nature was in fact the result of cultural conditioning, it was always with her own slant, and her critiques of Freud's psychology of women came to include veiled critiques of Horney when Horney began to move into the third (and nonculturalist) phase of her career.