Athol H. Personal Experiences

(1997).
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 78:899-911

Personal ExperiencesProfessional Interests: Joan Riviere And Femininity
M. Athol Hughes
The author proposes that the subject chosen for psychoanalytical investigation
bears a relationship to autobiographical experiences. Aspects of the life of the
British psychoanalyst, Joan Riviere (1883-1962), are examined and related to
her investigation into a form of pathological femininity presented in her paper
Womanliness as a masquerade. Information about her formative years is gained
from a diary kept by her mother that gives details of Joan Riviere's early months
and years as well as further information about her as a young adult. Riviere's
own diary, which lists events and activities in which she took part throughout
more than a decade before she became a psychoanalyst, gives valuable insights
into her life at that time. The author examines the descriptions of the patient in
Riviere's paper and relates it to many facets of the latter's life. The defensive
femininity shown by her patient is characterised by appeasement and denial of
intellectual and professional attributes to escape detection and the retribution
feared as a consequence of having, in phantasy, stolen potency from men. It is
suggested that Riviere's own life experiences, particularly in relation to men, are
represented in her paper.
The topic selected for consideration by a writer is bound to have autobiographical
implications at one level or another. In this paper I will show how aspects of the life of the
British psychoanalyst, Joan Riviere, influenced her choice of subject for psychoanalytical
investigation. One subject that held her interest and about which she wrote is femininity and I
would like to show that one of her papers, Womanliness as a masquerade, mirrors in its
presentation facets of her personal experiences.
When Joan Riviere was starting to practise as a psychoanalyst in London in the 1920s,
female sexuality was under scrutiny (Abraham, 1925; Jones, 1927; Klein, 1928). Freud's
patriarchal monistic approach to female sexuality had been the one that for the most part
dominated the scene when women's sexual development and experience were being
considered (Deutsch, 1930; Lampl-De Groot, 1928). But Freud himself had said that it
would be women psychoanalysts who would throw a brighter light on what was considered a
dark continent. Freud (1933) defined femininity in relation to masculinity, with femininity
not a thing in its own right but rather a lack, a deficiency, which women had to tolerate,
generally to their disadvantage. The result was that women were seen as not only morally
inferior but passive, envious and vain.
In her paper, Womanliness as a masquerade (1929), Riviere presents a different view of
femininity and some of its pathological manifestations.
There are references to women's sexuality in some of her other papers such as Jealousy
as a mechanism of defence (1932) and On the genesis of psychical conflict in earliest
infancy (1936a), as well as her papers on the inner world as seen in literature (1952b) and

(Initial version received 21/2/96)
(Final revised version received 18/5/97)
Copyright Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1997
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the theatre (1952a). Womanliness as a masquerade, however, is particularly concerned
with the constituents of female sexuality and one can see that elements of her life and
experiences find expression through her presentation of the subject.
Riviere had a capacity to bring the unconscious to life, a capacity that she so much
admired in Freud. Despite this, she could take Freud to task for his view that women's sexual
function and sexual character remain latent until the discovery of the lack of a penis (1934).
Through her work, stimulated by that of Klein on the infant's relationship to the mother in the
first months of life, we obtain a view of her perceptive appreciation of the struggles between
and within the sexes.
In Womanliness as a masquerade, Riviere discusses the girl's relationship to both
parents, but she emphasises her relationship to the mother. We are fortunate in having
information concerning Joan Riviere's first year of life and her further development, in the
form of a diary kept by her mother, Mrs Verrall, who describes in considerable detail Joan's
first days and months and gives additional information about her daughter's childhood,
adolescence and early married years. In addition, a chronological list of events kept by Joan
Riviere herself from 1905 when she was 22 years old to 1919, when she became a founder
member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, adds to the story. This material came to
light after the biographical chapter in the book of her collected papers, entitled The Inner
World and Joan Riviere(Hughes, 1991) was published. Some of the details from her diary
were added to the biographical chapter before publication, but they were not examined in
relation to her work. Her mother's diary was unavailable for consideration at that time.
We know from various sources that Joan Riviere suffered from emotional problems in
adulthood. Letters that she wrote to Ernest Jones, available in the Archives of the British
Psycho-Analytical Society, indicate an unresolved and highly eroticised transference in her
analysis with him, while the correspondence between Ernest Jones and Freud concerning her
psychoanalysis with the latter in 1922 (Paskauskas, 1993) gives us additional information
about the difficulties she suffered. There were countertranferential troubles in her first
analysis: Jones had overstepped the boundaries of the analytic relationship, as in, for
instance, lending her his country cottage and telephoning her about his impending marriage.
Knowing that the analysis was stalemated, Jones had encouraged Riviere to go to Freud for
analysis.
Anton Kris has examined the Jones/Freud correspondence concerning Riviere's analysis
in his valuable paper on Freud's treatment of a narcissistic patient (1994). Freud addressed
Riviere's narcissism and lessened her tendency to self-deprivation, which was caused by a
vicious circle of punitive, unconscious self-deprivation, and excessive demand (Kris,
1994p. 657). Furthermore, Kris suggests that part of Freud's treatment of Riviere was to heal
the wound between her and Jones by helping the latter find an appropriate place for her in the
British Psycho-Analytical Society as Translating Editor of the International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis on her return from Vienna.
If we look for earlier expressions of Riviere's emotional troubles, we find that her mother
records in her diary that the 18-year-old Joan showed a lack of warmth and lovable
qualities at home. If Joan's lack of lovable qualities was an indication of emotional troubles,
it found more explicit expression nine years later, in 1910. This was the year after the death
of her father of whom she was very fond and with whom Jones said she had a strong
identification (22 January 1922, Paskauskas, 1993). In her diary she reported frequent
insomnia, gastritis, colds, flu and styes. She consulted various medical specialists and at
least one prominent psychiatrist of the day. She recorded eleven consultations with M. B.
Wright in 1915. He was a well-known mental specialist of the time, whom Leonard Woolf
(1964) consulted about
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Virginia and of whom he said: he had not the slightest idea of the nature or cause of [her]
mental state no real or scientific knowledge of how to cure her (p. 160). As well as
taking rest cures at home Riviere was in nursing homes for what her mother described as
neurothenia from shocks for various periods, both before and after she had started
psychoanalysis with Ernest Jones in 1916.
In her paper, Womanliness as a masquerade, Joan Riviere is speaking with a voice that
has its own validity, and is as pertinent today as it was seventy years ago. It has attracted the
attention not only of psychoanalysts, but feminists, historians and those interested in film
(Heath, 1986). There are many indications in it that Riviere is addressing issues that are of
particular significance for herself. The woman patient she describes echoes much of her own
story, so that it is almost as if she were the patient. And there is some evidence that perhaps
she was.
The pathological femininity that Riviere found in her patient is seen by her as a mask and
the women who don it as participants in a masquerade. They can be seen as morally and
intellectually inferior, not because they lack a penis but because of hatred and sadism
directed towards those seen by them as possessing the penis that they do not have. Riviere
starts her presentation by referring to Ernest Jones's paper, The early development of female
sexuality (1927). She describes a certain type of woman, neither homosexual nor yet fully
heterosexual, who uses a kind of femininity to defend against masculine strivings.
Masculinity is stolen and must be hidden to avert the reprisals feared if the woman is found
to possess it. Riviere says that the capacity for womanliness is there, but it does not
represent the main development. Rivalry with the mother has never been resolved and it is
also great in relationship to the father. The women she describes who use femininity as a
mask are often excellent wives and mothers and have no lack of feminine interests, but
like the patient she describes in the paper, they might have difficulty speaking in public and
show their lack of confidence by seeking the reassurance of a man or men in the audience.
Riviere stresses the incongruity of this attitude on the part of her patient when it is contrasted
with her impersonal and objective attitude during her intellectual performance. Success
confirms her phantasy of having castrated the father and leads to the need for reassurance of a
father figure after her presentation. The presentation over, she is filled with anxiety
concerning the consequences she fears: she has shown herself in possession of the father's
penis and masculinity. She denies the success of her performance and puts on a mask of
femininity to escape detection and consequent reprisals. Persistent conflict of this nature in
relation to men prevents full expression of genital sexuality.
In a letter that Freud wrote to Joan Riviere a year before this paper was published (9
September 1928, Hughes, 1992), he said I welcome your promise soon to write something
for publication. Anything you write about yourself personally is sure of my interest. We do
not have Riviere's contributions in her correspondence with Freud during and after the year
of psychoanalysis she had with him in 1922. One can assume from Freud's comment that
Riviere had told him that she was writing a paper that was concerned in some way with her
own life. We know from his correspondence with Jones (Paskauskas, 1993) that Freud was
impressed with Riviere's intelligence and dedication to psychoanalysis. He wanted her to be
more than his, or any other's, amanuensis; he wanted her to find her own voice and make her
own contributions to psychoanalysis, as well as be his preferred translator.
Another indication that Joan Riviere was speaking of herself in this paper lies in the fact
that when Jones was referring her to Freud for psychoanalysis after the analysis she had with
him broke down, he said: she can talk fluently at a meeting where she was once dumb from
angst (22 January 1922,
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Paskauskas, 1993). In the same letter he also said of her: Incidentally she has a strong
complex about being a well-born lady (county family) and despises all the rest of us,
especially the women. In Womanliness as a masquerade, Riviere emphasises her patient's
rivalry with women and hatred of them; the patient deals with rivalry and hatred by adopting
a superior attitude. Riviere's snobbishness and arrogance is apparent in the letter she wrote
to her mother and sister from Vienna, when she returned there to continue her analysis with
Freud in October 1922. The letter is printed as a postscript in her Collected Papers. She had
been at the Seventh International Psycho-Analytical Congress in Berlin, which took place
from 24 to 27 September of that year. Her comment that, at the banquet at the end of the
Congress, Dr Cole being put at the top table was an enigma which no-one could solve and
which stirred poor Dr Bryan and Miss Low to the depths is snide, while her description of
the other occupant of her sleeper on the train to Berlin, as a common little actress, covered
in scent, who cringed but seemed to realise Joan Riviere's superior claims, so that the
latter got her own way, is an example of her arrogance and snobbishness. In his letter to
Riviere (30 January 1923, Hughes, 1992) after her analysis with him had ended, Freud
expressed regret that he did not keep her for six months longer; he might have succeeded in
helping her to see the connections between neurosis and national or social prejudice and we
both may have derived some benefit from this study, perhaps after several stormy hours.
In Womanliness as a masquerade, the patient's anxiety after her public-speaking
performances (her work took the form of writing and speaking), and her misgivings that she
had responded inappropriately, are reminiscent of Riviere's anxiety that prevented her from
speaking at meetings of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, as reported by Jones. Further
evidence of a similarity between Riviere and her patient lies in her description of the latter's
proficiency as a housewife. The roots of the patient's proficiency lay in her competitiveness
with her mother; she used the proficiency to surpass her mother, win her approval and prove
her superiority to rival feminine women. Joan Riviere's daughter, Diana Riviere, told me
that her mother's relationship with her own mother was difficult. Joan looked down on her
mother because she came from a lower social and intellectual class than her father. Mrs
Verrall was the daughter of a Devonshire clergyman and she had been a governess before her
marriage. Mr Verrall, a solicitor, came from a more intellectual and literary upper-middle-
class background. Riviere describes her patient's father as a literary man, involved in
politics, as was her father.
According to Diana Riviere, Mrs Verrall was a perfectionistic Victorian housewife, and
her daughter was even more perfectionistic in this womanly role. There are frequent entries
in the diaries of both mother and daughter of intolerably uncomfortable houses that are
painful to visit. Miss Riviere said that there was a quick turnover of maids in her mother's
household; they never lived up to her mother's expectations. Confirmation of this lies in
several entries in Joan Riviere's diary of maids coming and going. It would seem that she
worked hard to attain the reputation she enjoyed as a gracious hostess in a beautiful home
(Heimann, 1963).
In Womanliness as a masquerade, Riviere says that her patient's rivalry with her mother
also found expression in her intellectual achievements. The patient had to overcome a
tendency to use her intelligence to triumph over others less endowed than her. In the paper
she explains the sadistic rivalry directed towards both parents in terms of infantile
disappointment or frustration during sucking or weaning, coupled with an interpretation of the
primal scene in oral terms; in this she follows Klein's work on the Oedipus complex (1928).
The infant girl considers
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both parents as rivals; the sadism is directed against both, the revenge of both is feared.
But, she continues, as always with girls the mother is the more hated, and consequently the
more feared. So the girl in her anxiety has to deny her own attributes, placate the mother and
atone for her crimes, carried out in phantasy against her mother, her body, her husband and
her children. She identifies herself with her father, and uses the masculinity thus obtained by
putting it at the service of the mother. Riviere contends that the girl can do this if she obtains
massive recognition for the efforts of restitution she makes. Unconsciously she seeks
recognition of her supremacy in having the penis to give back. If gratitude is withheld, her
sadism breaks out in full force.
At the end of her paper, Riviere considers the constituents of fully developed
heterosexuality. It is founded on satisfaction at the oral-sucking stage, as Jones and Deutsch
had stated, and it coincides with the attainment of genitality. Riviere quotes Abraham (1925),
according to whom genitality implies the attainment of a post-ambivalent state. Riviere
seems to agree with Abraham on this point but then contradicts it, by saying that both the
normal woman and the homosexual desire the father's penis and rebel against frustration;
but one of the differences between them lies in the degree of sadism, the power of dealing
both with it and with the anxiety it gives rise to in the two types of women (p. 101). She
considers that it is a matter of the extent of the sadism that determines the outcome, either
normal or homosexual, not its elimination as the post-ambivalent state would suggest.
Riviere says that an increase in the ability to deal with sadism, its amelioration, and a
lessening of its accompanying anxiety leads to full heterosexuality and differentiates the
homosexual woman from the heterosexual. The renunciation of the wish to castrate leads to
self-sacrifice, devotion, and self-abnegation in women, which are efforts to restore and
make good, whether to mother or to father figures, what has been taken from them. Efforts to
restore and make good the damage done are those characteristics of the depressive position
as outlined by Klein six years later, in 1935. The idea that these efforts lead to self-sacrifice
and self-abnegation, makes this resolution sound as if, to Riviere, the woman is still trying to
placate, deny her attributes, atone for her crimesall characteristics of women who use
femininity as a mask. Resolution of sadism in the depressive position leads to self-fulfilment
and regeneration, not to self-sacrifice and self-denial. As an extremely intelligent woman
who had so much insight into the inner world and sensitivity to Klein's meanings, and such a
command of Englishas shown in her writings and in her ability to translate Freud's work
into an English that he so much appreciated why did Riviere not contribute more to
psychoanalytic theory than she did? Was this because she considered that there actually is no
resolution to sadism, and if there is no resolution to sadism the woman has to placate, atone
for her crimes, deny and sacrifice her attributes, as she says of women who don a mask of
femininity? Is this what she did? A consideration of her history may provide an answer to
some facets of these questions.
I have said that her mother's diary records in detail her first months and years and then
gives a month-by-month account of her childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. Joan's
own diary is a record of events, visits, participation in social, artistic and political activities,
perhaps derived from a more comprehensive one that she destroyed. This record is, for the
most part, strictly factual with one-line entries of events for successive months in the years
from 1905 to 1919.
Joan Riviere was born Joan Hodgson Verrall on 28 June 1883. Her mother, ne Anna
Hodgson, was the third girl of fourteen children of a Devonshire clergyman. Joan was born a
year after the death of Mrs Verrall's first child, a boy, who died the day after his birth. Joan's
mother wrote that she had
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dreaded Joan's birth after the experience of losing her first child. However, she considered
herself fortunate to be spared a repetition of that and had on the whole a really good time.
Right from the start, Mrs Verrall's concerns are not so much concentrated on her new baby
but are, instead, on herself and her own reactions. It is as if she wonders if the baby is going
to confirm her capacities as a mother by living or whether this baby, too, will die and cause
her pain. She is tremendously relieved that this is not the case, and describes the baby Joan
as perfectly healthy, weighing nine and a quarter pounds, very long in body and limbs with
beautiful hands like her father's and a good quantity of long brown hair.
If her mother had wanted another boy as a replacement child, it is not apparent in her
description of Joan's beauty and intelligence. However she notes that the baby is very
nervous and is easily frightened by sudden noises and movements, she will need very gentle
treatment. Her remark about Joan's sensitivity finds an echo in Freud's comment to Jones,
thirty-nine years later, when he wrote concerning Joan Riviere's return to London from
Vienna after her analysis with him had ended: I fear she will require special care and regard
indefinitely (letter 367, June 1922, Paskauskas, 1993).
A month later Joan was christened, she looked sweet in a lovely robe which was our
present, her handsome cloak and hood being her grandmother Verrall's present. I was so glad
to be able to be present at our darling's baptism but it reminded me very sadly of that other
baptism where I was almost alone. There is considerable evidence that Joan Riviere may
have grown up feeling she should please her mother and be good and well in order to
reassure her.
The 7-week-old infant Joan suffered a loss herself when her father went away for a three-
week holiday to Switzerland, which his wife said he very much needed. This is the first of
the many expressions of Mrs Verrall's deep concern for her husband and his health. He was
frequently ill and suffered from rheumatic fever from which he died as a relatively young
man in 1909.
Mrs Verrall continues with the story of her daughter: she has found her voice now and
cries more than I like over her morning dressing, though Marsh, her nice young nurse, is very
gentle with her, but she is still very good on the whole and has never yet cried in the night.
The mother's hopes that she will not be disturbed by Joan or her two other children (Molly,
two years younger than Joan and Hugh Cuthbert, four years younger) indicate that she was not
a mother who was a container of infantile distress. That was the responsibility of nurse.
For instance, Mrs Verrall was pleased that she was away when one-year-old Cuthbert
caught a small toy in his throat and choked and nurse had great difficulty getting it out. She
poor thing thought he was dying, and was dreadfully upset all day afterwards. Happily, we
being out at the time were spared the worst of it. The nurse was not spared, nor was the
child: another time Cuthbert tumbled out of his high chair, bruised his face, cried himself to
sleep. However the next day he did not seem any the worse for it. His mother's cryptic
comment: Nurse back, Jubilate! reflects her attitude to infantile distress and difficulties:
nurse must spare the mother the traumas of suffering children.
The same lack of concern for the child is apparent in her description of weaning the baby
Joan who was nursed at the breast for a month; then her mother reported that she required
more than I could give and breast feeding was supplemented with bottles, the bottle feeding
was gradually increased and Joan was fully weaned at 3 months. Mrs Verrall writes: my
meals were certainly of very little use to her and it is hoped that my inflamed eyelids may
benefit by giving it up. Thus the baby Joan's deprivation somehow could lead to a cure for
her mother's inflamed eyelids. One can speculate that Mrs Verrall thought that infants and
their needs are not good for mothers. It is interesting to
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note that when Joan was having severe emotional troubles as an adult, she had repeated
styes. Inman's work (1946) showed that unresolved emotional difficulties related to birth can
lead to eye disorders. His findings have been investigated further by Brook (1995), who
reports that inflammatory eye troubles can arise where there has been inadequate mourning
in those who have suffered painful losses.
One wonders whether Mrs Verrall had been unable to mourn the loss of her first born
child, and whether she found closeness to the baby and breast feeding too disturbing, so that
she did not have enough for Joan and had inflamed eyelids. Had Joan not been able to
mourn the loss of her father as she had not been able to mourn earlier losses? Was inadequate
mourning the cause of her inflamed eyes at the time of her breakdown after his death? In her
diary of the year of her father's death in 1909, Joan records that she was called to Brighton
(where she was born and her parents lived), suddenly, the day before he died, 19 June. Five
days later she tells us that she was back and to a play that evening. A five-day period with
her mother after her father's death seems extremely short, particularly in those days of more
ritualised mourning activity. Mrs Verrall wrote that Joan could hardly bear to say good-bye
to her father as he was dying and had to leave the room after he said be kind to your mother.
Mrs Verrall left Joan for a week when she was 6 months old. Joan suffered from colds
nearly all the next month; perhaps this was the start of her process of somatisation at times of
partings and separations. At 9 months she was able to get about the room anywhere she
likes. However the next entry notes that she fell off their bed on to her head. Her mother
deduced that she had not been seriously hurt in that she was able to scream instantaneously
and violently. After the first screams she was wonderfully good and brave and tried to smile
through her tears at her Daddy. The next day she had recovered, to the extent that she
crawled up to the mirror in the wardrobe and kissed, licked and patted the little face she sees
therein fits of laughter all the timeshe certainly can be very comic.
The detailed account of Joan's development came to an end with her first tooth and her
first birthday, and her parents left to travel in Europe for three and a half months. Again, there
is no mention of the mother's sorrow at leaving a one-year-old baby, nor of the baby's
reaction to the separation. Before their return Joan's mother was pregnant with another girl,
Molly, born 18 April 1885. Two weeks before Molly's birth, Joan fell and cut a corner of
her eyelid so badly that it had to be stitched. Three months after Molly's birth, the parents
once more went to Europe, Joan was then 2 years old. Even in the context of the times and the
social class of the Verralls, to leave a 3-month-old child in order to travel abroad is an
example of extreme denial of infantile need. The reason for the trip abroad was once more
Mr Verrall's health. Another time, when the youngest child, Cuthbert, was one month old, he
was sent away with a nurse when the older children developed whooping cough. If Mrs
Verrall had more contact with the emotional needs of her baby she would have taken him
away herself and left the older children to be nursed.
When Joan was 3 years old, her father's illnesses were attributed to rheumatic fever. From
that time, Mrs Verrall notes with increasing frequency that her husband was ill, was tired,
needed rest, needed to get away from his duties as a solicitor. The next year, Mrs Verrall
records slight attacks of diptheria suffered by the children; the chills from which her
husband suffered are noted with greater alarm. Her repudiation of concern is apparent in the
idea of a slight attack of the serious, often fatal, disease of diphtheria.
When Joan was about 4 her mother began to teach her reading and writing. This was
followed by more formal education at 6, and at 8 she started on what was to be of interest
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and value to her in her later years, attendance at a school of art for drawing lessons. At 9 she
began to study the violin. She did well in her studies and showed an aptitude for languages.
Her brother, however, was slow to learn. At 5, his mother writes: he is still rather a baby
and learning nothing from lessons, but has developed a great talent for argument. By the time
he was 6 his mother had decided he had a strong taste for manual work and mechanics.
The poor boy, as she frequently referred to him, also had curvature of the spine and his
feet are not right, but he was big and strong and very loving.
By 1898 Joan was at Wycombe Abbey School, a well-known girls boarding school
where she was unhappy. Two years later, at 17, she had left school and was at home, not
wella probable euphemism for unhappiness. Her unhappiness was possibly one of the
reasons for her not attending university. For one thing she would not have had the entrance
requirements and, furthermore, she probably would not have felt at home in one of the
women's colleges even though an aunt, Margaret Verrall, was a lecturer at Newnham
College, Cambridge. Instead of university she went to Germany. Her mother wrote that they
had found a Frulein Metzeroth at Gotha where Joan would learn German and also study
violin and painting. Two days after this entry, her parents saw her off at Victoria station. Her
mother wrote: The child has been very good and went off bravely. It seems hard to send her
away for a whole year. I believe that it is right to do so. She has a fine stock of clothes,
almost all made at home, her taste in dress is excellent. Mrs Verrall's concern about sending
an unhappy adolescent child away for a year is ameliorated by thinking of her nice clothes.
However, her daughter Diana Riviere told me that her mother hated her home made clothes;
perhaps it was her hatred of them that lead her to take up dress-designing after she returned
from Germany. In this she could use her artistic talents and still enjoy the social and
intellectual life that she records in her diary, meeting many of the artists and intellectuals of
the day. These include among others the artists, Sickert, Vanessa Bell, the portrait painters
Gerard Kelly and R. G. Eves, for whom she sat; the writers, Enid Bagnold and E. M. Forster,
Arthur Waley, the translator of Chinese poetry, as well as leaders in areas of social and
psychological activity and reform, reported below.
On her return from Germany, Joan attended coming-out balls. Her mother was pleased
with her daughter's popularity and social successes and the fact that she, Mrs Verrall, was
immensely congratulated, Joan is considered so very distinguished and carries her height
extremely well. We feel very proud of her but she is still very lacking in softness and lovable
qualities at home. Joan's distinctiveness, for which her mother is congratulated, was
observed by a family friend who had known her grandmother. She told Mrs Verrall that Joan
reminded her of this grandmother who, forty-two years before, had so impressed her. She
said: Joan's likeness to her grandmother is striking and the unconscious air of superiority
just the same.
The air of superiority did not solve the problems of unhappiness, and Joan was taken to
see doctors in London and to stay under Dr Griffith for a week in March 1902 and again six
months later; A small operation was carried out which Dr Griffith thought she would never
be well without. The reason for the small operation was not given; perhaps it was the first
of several efforts to treat gynaecological problems from which Joan suffered and reported in
her diary and for which she had an hysterectomy in 1923.
In 1906 Joan married Evelyn Riviere, a barrister, the son of Briton Riviere, R. A., a well-
known painter of the day. On their honeymoon he became very ill and remained so for a long
time. At one point Joan called his illness English cholera, and her mother said that Evelyn
was badly poisoned, so that one can surmise that he had severe intestinal troubles. Not only
did Joan have to deal with a father who was becoming increasingly
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weakened by rheumatic fever, but she had a husband who became seriously ill immediately
after their wedding.
Their only child, Diana, was born on 7 June 1908. Mrs Verrall reports a month later that
the baby was not well. When Joan was in nursing homes her mother looked after Diana,
supervising nurses. Rest and quiet in or out of nursing homes was the prescribed treatment
for neurasthenia of the day. This treatment, the patriarchal control of the doctor and the
submissive role of the woman has been vividly described by Elaine Showalter (1987) in her
book The Female Malady, Women, Madness and English Culture 1830- 1980.
As well as entries in Joan's diary of illnesses and difficulties there are many that show her
involvement in social issues and social reform. In this she emulates her father. She worked
for Divorce Law Reform and investigated a position with the Legal Defence Society. She
was a suffragette; she knew Eva Hubback who was educating women about birth control. She
met Marie Stopes. She learnt Russian. She attended Medico-Psychological Society Meetings
in 1913. This was the year that this Society founded the first public clinic in England to offer
psychoanalytic treatment (Boll, 1962). Two women, Dr Jessie Margaret Murray and Julia
Turner, with financial backing from the psychoanalytic novelist May Sinclair, founded the
clinic. Many of the women doctors working in this clinic became active members of the
British Psycho-Analytical Society founded by Ernest Jones in 1919, as did Joan Riviere.
In reporting the meeting of the Medico-Psychological Society, Riviere said that it took
place at May Sinclair's house and that Amber Blanco-White was there. Blanco-White is
mentioned several times in her diary. She was interested in the philosophy of science. She
had a love affair with H. G. Wells, the repercussions of which split the Fabian Society down
the middle.
Riviere also attended meetings and worked for the Society for Psychical Research in
which her uncle, her father's oldest brother, A. W. Verrall, professor of classics at
Cambridge, and other intellectuals, were deeply involved. It was that Society that brought the
first discoveries of what was to become psychoanalysis to the attention of English readers.
Three months after Breuer & Freud's work was published in January 1893, a member, W. E.
Myers, made their findings known to the Society. Joan was then 10 years old and her mother
wrote of a visit made by her to her uncle in Cambridge that year. Perhaps she heard of
psychoanalysis at that time.
The cause of Riviere's emotional difficulties can only be surmised. The lack of genuine
maternal warmth and concern for infants and their distress is apparent in the entries of her
mother's diary. There is so much denial of childhood pain and lack of maternal devotion that
in many ways Mrs Verrall could be seen as the woman in the masquerade. However, as the
wife and mother her activities do not correspond to Riviere's patient's, which were of a
professional nature. None the less, it is as if Mrs Verrall puts on a mask of a chatelaine
who runs her household beautifully, is a gracious hostess, but misses the essence of true
femininity and maternity.
It is also of note that there were four important males in Joan Riviere's life, whose
illnesses and deaths must have played a part in how she viewed men, and herself in relation
to them. She could easily have felt unconsciously responsible for and guilty about their
illnesses, difficulties and deaths. Her mother's first child died after one day of life a year
before her birth. If Mrs Verrall's principle preoccupation was to avoid pain, then his birth
and death, in causing her pain, was a calamity, of which she feared a repetition with the birth
of her second child, Joan. Her anxiety must have communicated itself to Joan. Then Joan's
younger brother, Cuthbert, was, as Miss Riviere told me, the black sheep of his family and
like many black sheep of the day, he emigrated to Canada, served in the First World War,
and the family
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subsequently lost contact with him. His mother reported that he was not quick to learn, and
was awkward; she was dismissive of him and we know that Joan could be dismissive and
impatient of other's shortcomings. Joan identified strongly with her father, and was closer in
her affections to him than she was to her mother. His frequent weaknesses, illnesses and
early death affected her deeply. He was ill one way or another all her life. Her husband
became very ill on his wedding trip and remained so for many months.
The idea of stolen potency and fears of emasculated males described so vividly in her
paper could come directly from her own experiences. There is an entry in her mother's diary,
written the day before her husband's death, that describes Joan's final visit to her father. Not
only did he say to her, be kind to your mother but also, I have always loved Evelyn [Joan's
husband] even when there have been difficultiesand there have been difficulties, you
know, my child. Joan sobbed and said That is all over. Whatever the difficulties had been
between father and son-in-law, the fact that her father speaks of them to his daughter on his
death bed indicates that they were serious and might have involved her. Joan's response to
what he said, which was that is all over, suggests that she had been implicated in the
difficulties in some way.
Her relationship to her husband is unclear; little is known of their marriage. He died of
cancer in 1945, seventeen years before she died of emphysema in 1962. Riviere was quite a
private person but her daughter gave the impression that her parents were close. Riviere
mentions him in her diary frequently, often in connection with visits to his parents home in
the country. Jones, in introducing her to Freud, said that she had been a mistress to a number
of men (22 January 1922, Paskauskas, 1993), but the diary gives no hint as to that or to
who they were.
It now has to be asked, how much of a mask does Joan Riviere herself don? Her daughter,
Miss Diana Riviere, who died, aged 81, in December 1989, very generously gave me
information about her mother, some of which is pertinent to this question. She told me that,
like her mother, she was closer to her father than to her mother. She seems to have obtained
more mothering from her aunt, Joan's younger sister, Molly, than she did from her mother.
She stayed with her aunt and her grandmother quite often when her mother was in nursing
homes. She remembered that her mother had not inspected a boarding school before Diana
was sent to it. It would seem that Joan Riviere could have felt that she, like her mother,
assumed a mask of maternity. One can surmise that since, as recorded in her mother's diary,
her infantile distress was denied or ignored, she found infantile distress hard to bear in her
own child. This could be particularly the case since Diana was only a year or two old at a
time of Joan's breakdown after her father's death. Diana was 8 years old by the time her
mother was in a position to learn more about the sources of infantile distress through her
analyses and her analytic work, particularly through her work with Melanie Klein.
Joan Riviere's difficulties in looking after Diana no doubt contributed to her being the
only child. However, Riviere was able to acknowledge her troubles as psychological, rather
than physical, and to seek help from analysis at a time when many of her class and
background, such as Virginia Woolf, did not. From that experience she found a place within
psychoanalysis where she could give expression to her ability to understand the difficulties
of others through her understanding of herself and her powerful sense of the inner world. She
was highly perceptive in her understanding of the significance of Klein's ideas and
sensitively outlined the latter's theories of infantile development in several publications.
However, she never became a child analyst.
Riviere also describes a mask in her impressive paper, A contribution to the analysis
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of the negative therapeutic reaction (1936b). In discussing the lack of improvement in
narcissistic patients, she says that where narcissistic resistances are very pronounced
they are in fact part of a highly organised system of defence against a more or less
unconscious depressive condition in the patient and are operating as a mask and disguise to
conceal the latter (p. 138). With the depressive position in mind she explains how the
patient has to deny his own inner reality, which contains all his dead and dying internal
objects. In the analysis his unconscious agenda is to cure all those suffering objects before he
can be cured himself. It would seem that Riviere's understanding of herself is reflected in this
paper as well as in the one on femininity. As Kris points out (1994), she is speaking of
herself when she says that the patient puts on a mask of compliance (underlined in the
original) in analysis in order to be left alone,
Another indication that Riviere felt as if she had to hide behind a mask of compliance lies
in the last entry in her diary, 11 December 1919Reasonableness paper at the B. Psa
Society, and Rank was there. Minutes of the meeting of that date show that she read notes on
Matters of Principle, which was concerned with the question of the repression of emotion
during psychoanalysis. The title, Reasonableness, indicates that her analytic experiences
led her to consider that in order to be reasonable, the patient has to repress feelings about the
analyst. Unfortunately the paper was not published and is lost.
Joan Riviere had a keen appreciation of the mask that patients can adopt to escape
detection, and to avoid unrelenting depressive pain. As I have shown, I think her own
experiences played a part in her investigations, but the adoption of masks is far from her
whole story. She could write about them, because she had been there, but her ability to
express so sensitively the various forms of the masquerade, shows that she was no longer
caught in it. Her acuteness of vision, her sincerity and honesty has been remarked on by many
who knew her, such as Hanna Segal and Herbert Rosenfeld. These qualities are apparent in
her intellectual creative capacities that she used so effectively in the development of
psychoanalysis.
Acknowledgement: The author would like to acknowledge the encouragement from the
Editor and the helpful comments and suggestions from three anonymous reviewers.
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Article Citation [Who Cited This?]
Hughes, M.A. (1997). Personal ExperiencesProfessional Interests: Joan Riviere And
Femininity. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 78:899-911

Athol H. Personal Experiences

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(1997).

International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 78:899-911

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