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.
In Clara Thompson’s opinion one of the weakest links in the Freudian thinking has been the explanation of the psychology of women.
In her view it has been shown that cultural factors can explain the tendency of women feeling inferior about their sex.
In discussing woman's biological differences from man, she indicated the general ways in which society frustrates or distorts these basic drives.
She thought that patriarchal society utilizes these differences as a basis for establishing the male as superior, and the female as inferior.