Riviere | Joan Hodgson | née Verrall

Joan Hodgson Verrall was born on 28 Jun 1883 into a family of Cambridge academics and in 1906 married a barrister, Evelyn Riviere, the son of the painter Briton Riviere.

Her interest in psychoanalysis emerged from meetings of the Society for Psychical Research organised by her uncle, A W Verrall, where she encountered the work of Sigmund Freud and read papers by Ernest Jones.

She had already studied the German language in Germany when she was seventeen and her diary shows that she had begun to translate Freud by 1919. In her twenties she suffered from mental and physical ill health and underwent an analysis with Ernest Jones from 1916-1921. She attended early meetings of the British Psychoanalytical Society and at the Hague conference in 1920, she met Freud for the first time and asked to be analysed by him. She translated for the newly-created 'International Journal of Psychoanalysis', becoming its translation editor. In 1921 she joined Freud and his daughter Anna, Ernest Jones and James and Alix Strachey on the Glossary Committee, and worked with them to translate Freud's work, supervising the translation and editing volumes 1, 2 and 4 of the Collected Papers. She became Britain's first lay analyst and was later a key figure in the reception of Melanie Klein's ideas, taking an active role in the Controversial Discussions.

She had one daughter, Diana Briton Riviere. She died on 20 May 1962.

Psychoanalyst

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Revised 2024-04-04

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Revised by Ewan O'Neill