Joan Riviere

Joan Hodgson Riviere (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.

Riviere was born Joan Hodgson Verrall in Brighton, the daughter of Hugh John Verrall and his wife Ann Hodgson. Her father was a lawyer and her mother a vicar's daughter. She was educated in Brighton and then at Wycombe Abbey. At the age of seventeen, she went to Gotha, Germany, where she spent a year and became proficient in the German language. Her interests were primarily artistic and she was for a time a court dressmaker.

Riviere married in 1907 and had a child, but suffered a breakdown on the death of her father around that time. She took an interest in divorce reform and the suffragette movement. 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. Suffering from emotional distress, she went for therapeutic psychoanalysis with Ernest Jones in 1916. In 1916 and 1917 she spent some time in a sanatorium because of nerves. Jones was impressed by her understanding of psychoanalytic principles and processes and she became a founding member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, formed in 1919. At the Hague conference in 1920, she met Freud for the first time and asked to be analysed by him. She also met Melanie Klein. She was translation editor of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis from its inception in 1920 until 1937. In 1921 she worked with Freud and his daughter Anna Freud, Ernest Jones, James Strachey and Alix Strachey on the Glossary Committee, and translating Freud's work into English. She supervised the translation and editing of volumes 1, 2 and 4 of the Collected Papers, and is arguably the best translator of Freud's work: 'the incomparable Joan Riviere, that "tall Edwardian beauty wuth picture hat and scarlet parasol", whose renderings retained more of Freud's stylistic energy than any others'.

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