Joan Riviere

Joan Hodgson Riviere (née Verrall; 28 June 1883 – 20 May 1962) was a British psychoanalyst, who was both an early translator of Freud into English and an influential writer on her own account.

Her uncle, Arthur Woollgar Verrall organised meetings of the Society for Psychical Research where she discovered the work of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, and this stimulated her interest in psychoanalysis.

In 1929 she published "Womanliness as a Masquerade" in which she looks at an area of sexual development of intellectual women in particular, where femininity is a defensive mask that is put on to hide masculinity.

[5] From 1942 to 1944 Riviere took an active role in the Controversial discussions at the British Psychoanalytical Society, in particular supporting the Kleinian faction.

[1] Her paper on "On the Genesis of Psychical Conflict in Early Infancy" has been described as 'the clearest and most beautifully expressed outline of Kleinian theory as it was at that time'.

Such patients were characterised in his view by 'what may be called a "moral" facto, a sense of guilt, which is finding its satisfaction in the illness and refuses to give up the punishment of suffering.

[19] By contrast Riviere (drawing on Klein) 'puts the emphasis elsewhere...focuses attention on the patient's despair about her inner world and her hopelessness about making reparation'.

[20] She described forcefully the patient's 'trait of deceptiveness, the mask, which conceals this subtle reservation of all control under intellectual rationalisations, or under feigned compliance and superficial politeness'.

'Apropos of the resistances that mask the depressive position, Riviere slips in a revealing sentence that can be read at once professionally and confessionally: "This has been my own experience"'.