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International Psycho-Analytical Association
18 October 1927
London
Dear Professor,
I was glad to get your letter. There is only one point in it which I wish to answer, especially as I had not dealt with it in my previous one. It is your reproach that I neglected my part as leader in respect of Mrs. Riviere. I think you will see from the following considerations that this is not so.
To begin with, I did not find her views untrue in themselves,1 though they are presented in a one-sided and therefore misleading way. This I certainly endeavoured to influence to the best of my ability, but you know that she is a person of considerable determination and in any case there was no question of refusing to publish them. She gave way to the extent of modifying or omitting a great number of her expressions, but she could not agree with me that to present one side of the matter emphatically would have a misleading effect on the reader. There are two main points in her views, both of them related, and I think I can express them shortly. She insists that the child's unconscious picture of the parents to which it reacts in such manifold ways is far from being a photograph of them, but is throughout coloured by entirely individual contributions from the child's own component instincts, e.g. the idea of the parent may be much more sadistic than the reality, etc. etc.. This I should have thought was common ground in psycho-analysis; if not, it is in my opinion easily demonstrable. It also seems to me worth insisting on because of the tendency at times to identify the growing super-ego with the actual parents rather than with the child's particular picture of them. Naturally Mrs. Riviere would not deny the influence of real attributes to the parents in this compound, and I told her she was making a mistake in dwelling only on what might be called the phantastic half of the picture.
The second point is that repression, with the accompanying formation of guilt, super-ego, etc., is not effect