Ethel Jane Spector was born in Louisville, Kentucky. Her mother was a mathematician, and her father, a bar owner, died when she was 12. She earned a bachelor's degree from University of Chicago in 1956 and earned her medical degree in 1960 from the New York University College of Medicine. She married engineer Allen Person; they divorced after 10 years. In 1968 she married psychiatrist Barry Sherman, who died in 1976. In 1978 she married lawyer Stanley Diamond, who died in 2009. Person and Lionel Ovesey examined the etiology of transgender people based on the developmental model of Margaret Mahler. Ovesey's model emphasized the child's separation-individuation anxiety producing a fantasy of symbiotic fusion with the mother which the transsexual tries to resolve by surgically becoming her mother. Because they viewed these identities and behaviors as psychosexual disorders, they sought evidence for their theories in pornography shops and similar venues. Stephen Burt observed that even in her later writings, she concluded that "cross-gender disorders are disorders," because they can cause distress even without social prejudice. Person also researched love triangles and women's sexual needs. Person died of Alzheimer's disease at her home in Manhattan, New York.
Legacy
Many of Person's books are still in active circulation including The American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Psychoanalysis, which she edited along with Arnold M. Cooper and Glen O. Gabbard. Person wrote and edited several specialized studies of Freud.
On Freud's "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming" , co-edited with Servulo A. Figueira and Peter Fonagy
On Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia" , co-edited with Leticia Glocer Fiorini, Thierry Bokanowski, and Sergio Lewkowicz
Freud's "On Narcissism: An Introduction" , co-edited with Joseph Sandler and Peter Fonagy.
Two other research books by Ethel Person were published in the 1980s titled, Women--Sex and Sexuality, co-edited with Catharine R. Stimpson in 1980, and, Passionate Attachments: Thinking About Love, co-edited with Willard Gaylin circa 1988. Person was one of the few academically oriented authors who was also able to write books for popular audiences on a host of psychologically and culturally relevant themes in contemporary culture. She wrote Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion, from 2006, Feeling Strong: The Achievement of Authentic Power, from 2002, The Sexual Century, from 1999, and, By Force of Fantasy: How We Make Our Lives, from 1996.
Selected publications
;Books
Feeling Strong: The Achievement of Authentic Power
The Sexual Century
By Force of Fantasy: How We Make Our Lives
Dreams of Love And Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion
Women--Sex and Sexuality, edited by Catharine R. Stimpson and Ethel Spector Person. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Passionate Attachments: Thinking About Love, edited by Willard Gaylin and Ethel Person. New York : London : Free Press ; Collier Macmillan, c1988.
;Articles
Establishing trauma: The difficulty distinguishing between memories and fantasies
Extreme boyhood femininity: Isolated behavior or pervasive disorder?
The erotic transference in women and in men: Differences and consequences
