ABSTRACT
Joan Riviere is best known as a leading Kleinian analyst, an early colleague of Melanie Klein, who made some significant contributions to the analytic literature, especially in her 1936 “A contribution to the analysis of the negative therapeutic reaction” and, to a lesser extent, in her papers on female sexuality. Joan Riviere’s main, significant, and unique impact on psychoanalysis, however, occurred not so much through the novelty or breadth of the ideas that she put forth or her extensive clinical practice. Riviere’s 1929 paper on “Womanliness as masquerade” describes women whose femininity is exaggerated to conceal the fact that, in phantasy, they castrated men and stole their potency, which, in turn, is tied to destructive rivalrous feelings in relation to the maternal object. Joan Riviere’s character and how she applied herself to the founding and furthering of the International Journal in its early years, as has been briefly described here, arouses admiration.
