Refund and Reparation

Clara M. Thompson

Childhood and Family

Clara Mabel Thompson was born in Providence, Rhode Island on October 3, 1893 (Green, 1964). Her familyπs household was located in a rural area just outside Providence in which she lived with her immediate as well as extended family. While the family was financially secure there was some strife between the maternal and paternal grandparents especially over religious issues.

Her father, of who she was quite fond, was a highly successful business man who had climbed his way up the corporate ladder of Blanding and Blanding, a U.S. based drug company (Green, 1964). On the other hand, Clara was usually at odds with her mother, the disciplinarian of the family, who favored Clara's younger brother Frank. Clara spent most of her childhood as a highly active tomboy. She was well liked among the other children and spent most of her time engaged in sports and various outdoor activities.

 

Education

When Clara entered high school religion and scholarly pursuits became a much more important part of her life (Green, 1964). Her ardor for school was proven beyond a doubt by her standing at the head of the class in every subject for her entire high school career, which lasted from 1908 to 1912. Active involvement in the Baptist youth group known as Christian Endeavor as well as a self-proclaimed desire to become a medical missionary served to show her enthusiasm for religion. Christian Endeavor also served as an outlet for her more active side as she was able to continue many of the outdoor activities of her youth through this organization despite the increased intensity of her studies.

 

After graduating high school Clara entered the premed program at Brown University's Women's College (Green, 1964). During her years at Brown she eventually gave up her quest to become a religious missionary and discontinued her attendance at church. This move away from religious life caused a great rift between her and her family, especially her mother who remained distant from her for nearly twenty years. The years she spent at Brown were largely unhappy, but it wasn't until she entered Johns Hopkins that she would find the subject of her life's work.

Thompson came to Johns Hopkins in 1916, but it was in her second year that she met Lucille Dooley who offered her an introduction to psychoanalytic concepts (Green, 1964). Due to Thompson 's great enthusiasm Dooley invited her to work over the summer at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. It was during her summer at the hospital that she met William Alanson White, Edward Kempf, and Dr. Joseph Thompson all of whom helped her along her path towards becoming a psychoanalyst.

By the time she graduated from Hopkins in 1920 she had decided to specialize in psychiatry (Green, 1964). After doing her internship at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children she returned to Hopkins to start a three year residency at the Phipps Clinic under Adolf Meyer. During her residency at the clinic she also founded her friendship with Harry Stack Sullivan who would become her confidant and long time friend. Also during her residency she was given the honor of attending to Meyer's private patients due to the absence of the doctor to whom the responsibility usually fell. It was during her last year of residency that she began her own psychoanalytic treatment under Joseph Thompson, a situation which lead to a bitter disagreement between herself and Meyer, and her eventual dismissal from the clinic.

 

Joining the Field

After leaving Johns Hopkins in 1925 she established a private practice in Baltimore and began teaching mental hygiene at Vassar (Green, 1964). During this time she devoted herself almost exclusively to psychiatry and began networking with others in the field. In 1930 Sullivan organized the Washington-Baltimore Psychoanalytic Society and she was elected to be its first president. She continued holding meetings with many of her colleagues until she left for Budapest in 1931 where she was to undergo psychoanalysis with Sandor Ferenczi.

 

This trip to Budapest has been remarked upon as, "the most important single experience in this period of Clara Thompson's life" (Green, 1964). Her treatment under Ferenczi had actually begun earlier in 1927 when her analysis with Thompson had grown stagnant and she had arranged to meet Ferenczi, while he was lecturing at the New School in New York, following a suggestion made by Sullivan. During the time of her analysis she also exchanged ideas with Ferenczi, who at the time was becoming more interested in the relationship between the patient and the analyst. She also discussed Sullivan's ideas with Ferenczi who found them very similar to his own. On top of all this, Thompson had a romantic affair with an American businessman who was also undergoing analysis by Ferenczi. Unfortunately, both the affair and her analysis ended in 1933 when Ferenczi died.

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Bibliography

 

• Green, Maurice R. (Ed.). (1964). Interpersonal psychoanalysis: The selected papers of Clara M. Thompson. New York: Basic Books Inc.

   

• Thompson, Clara M. (1950). Psychoanalysis: Evolution and development. New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons.

   

• Thompson, Clara M. (1957). The different schools of psychoanalysis. American Journal of Nursing, 57, 1304-1307.

   

• Thompson, Clara M. (1953). Towards a psychology of women. Pastoral Psychology, 4 (34), 29-38.

Now, you'll find, inevitably, some Freudian analysis type thing run off a case. It's inevitable. But boy, it's so late on the track that if Freud ever made anybody sane by getting the time that they saw a little girl with no clothes on and that made them crazy and Freud made them realize that this was the case and so forth, and if anybody turned sane at that point and stayed sane, I've never seen it. I have never seen it.

I have made people feel better by using straight Freudian analysis the way I got it from Commander Thompson who imported it to the US Navy, not via Catherine Horney. Wonderful pun on that name. Why this person should become an authority on Freud is beyond me entirely. Crude remark. Excuse me, ladies. But Freud's a pretty crude subject.

But I got what I knew about Freudian analysis from a chap who had just talked with and listened to Freud for a couple of years. You know. And it was fairly straight from the horse's mouth. And it had factors in it that you don't find in his books. And also had factors in it which seemed awfully simple and reasonable. And Freud was much more interested in association. He was much more interested in association than he was in sex. And later on in his career actually did start changing his mind over to social. And he was getting - he was getting awfully warm; if he'd gone along for another couple of decades with any enthusiasm at all, why, he might have really fallen into something.

He had this thing, see, when he talked about creativeness, he's always talking about artists. See? He's talking about artists. Only to him being artistic was a dramatization of being sexual. See, artistry was a dramatization of a suppressed second dynamic; and an artist became an artist because he was no fun in bed or something.

That's not true. I've lived with an awful lot of artistic people and I've listened to an awful lot of their women and it's just not true that they're in bad shape. It's quite remarkably the opposite. So I don't think Freud was a very good observer.

If a child hurts self, what to do at once and later?"

It all depends on what you mean by "at once." But if you mean really at once, that's shut up. Child hurts himself, at once you shut up. Now, try not to say, "Shush, shush, shush" and "Stop it" and "Keep quiet" to everybody around you. Just shut up. If the other people are talking, too, why, you sometimes can shove them away, but don't engage in much persiflage. And you'll find a child doesn't get stuck all over the track. That's the first thing you do. And afterwards, why, best thing to do is try to engage in a little mimicry with him, I found lately. Nonconversational mimicry. Child looks at you and says... And finally you look at him and you say... He gets the idea, and he'll come right out of it.

I've busted a kid out of an engram with about fifteen seconds of mimicry -- broken him right out of an immediate injury; I mean, a serious injury. And he came right out of it. Bang! About fifteen seconds. He did something quite by accident, and I did something, and he looked at me, and he did something, and I did something, and he did something, and I did something. Notice I was making him cause. What he did, he did by accident.

That's a trick I learned from Commander Thompson, by the way. He used to train cats. It's almost impossible to train a house cat — I mean really train a house cat into doing all sorts of dog tricks and so forth. He used to be able to do that, and he taught me how to train cats when I was a kid. He would wait for the cat to do something and then he'd reward it. And if you don't think that requires patience! You're going to wait for this cat to do something that's going to be totally accidental, and then you're going to approve of it. Wow! Oh, you can just burn up hours and hours and hours trying to train a cat.

Well, be perfectly prepared to burn up a lot of time doing this with a kid. You wait for a kid who is injured to make a move. See? Wave his hand a little bit. Wave your hand a little bit. Something like this. And so that might look to you as a very slow route on patching up children.

The processes which work on children are as follows: Mimicry, Mimicry, Mimicry, Mimicry, Mimicry, and then Locational, and candy.

My father was a naval officer, shipped around various places. Well thought of. It was a calm world. I didn't have any business worrying about this sort of a problem, because it wasn't a personal problem. Whether people went mad or stayed sane was very, very little to me. It meant really nothing. And I figured everything in the world's all nailed down.

Well, here's the very problem of thinkingness itself with which we are dealing continually in the field of science, not nailed down—not even vaguely nailed down. Nobody even adventuring to solve it. Well, how can you go anyplace in the field of physics if you don't know the smallest unit of energy? How small can energy get?

Here was a stumbler. Here was a big idea there—sitting there, of "There must be more in the field of physics than we know about. And if there is so much more in the field of physics than we know about we must be studying one tiny little piece of the spectrum." Therefore, what is the field of physics? It has demonstrated that the human mind evidently uses and stores energy smaller than anything we know about. Well, I went around in circles for a while and threw the whole problem in the ashcan and went on with my studies in an orderly fashion. Perfectly happy to observe Brownian movements and other things.

And I had, however, a little more background on it. Commander Thompson had studied with Freud and he was a good friend of mine and he talked to me a great deal about having psychoanalysis. So I went back and reviewed a bunch of the stuff which he'd talked to me about and studied it over again. Hopeful, you see, that there was some clue there.

Well, there wasn't any clue there. This was not... this was not the sort of orderly thinking which can be embraced by a solid science like physics. And... because physics may have a great many things wrong with it, but it does have this: it of necessity continues to be reasonable. It insists on workability. It won't take wild shots and theories just on their face value. These things have to work. And that is the one thing which physics can contribute. Things have to work in the real universe. You either get an effect or you don't. You can't guess that you get an effect, you see. An engineer building a tunnel can't just guess that he's built a tunnel. When the train goes through the thing, it will either go through a tunnel or hit a solid mountain. And it's not healthy to hit solid mountains with trains. You get fired for having such things happen.

So the point is, is here we have a test of workability, which of course is a whole methodology of thought.

Well, I went over to a fellow over at Saint Elizabeth's, William Allen White. I talked to him for a little while and I became... He was very reasonable fellow, nice guy. He'd been a friend of mine before this, by the way, and a very, very nice fellow. And we were having a very informal discussion this way and that, and he was unfortunate enough however to throw me a few titbits which tended to put me in my place about the field of the human mind, you see.

So I sat down and proved to him that the human mind couldn't possibly remember anything. Demonstrated it to him conclusively. And he looked at this and the man went almost white. He was a very brilliant man. He had no difficulty in assimilating this material. But he had just been presented with the fact that if the mind does run on energy, if it is contained in the body, if neurons do think, if people do remember, if there's life at all, the human brain has very little to do with it.

Well, of course I might very well have upset the man more than necessary because this is not necessarily a horribly world-shaking conclusion, but William Allen White chose to consider it so. And here was the greatest man in his day, on the subject of the human mind, being utterly confounded. Why was he being confounded? He was looking at the scientific methodology of physics suddenly applied to the field of the mind. And of course, it's like taking a bright, sharp, new sword that nobody knew was there and just slicing everything up. It was a great shock.

"Well, you know," he said "if you care to," he said, "you go on with this." He said, "It's out of my depth already." He says, "You realize nobody in medicine is trained in mathematics. Nobody is trained in physics, logic, geometry, energy, any one of these things."

And he said, "What you've got in front of you there seems to prove that the research of the mind itself belongs in the field of mathematics, energy, geometry, not in the field of philosophy and speculation." Quite interesting. He gave up the ghost. I don't think he ever did much more research after that either.

But it wasn't until 1938 that I had any kind of an inkling of what was going on. In 1938 I found out there was something wrong with hypnotism.