Impious Fidelity: Anna Freud, Psychoanalysis, Politics by Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (review)

Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg’s Impious Fidelity: Anna Freud, Psychoanalysis, Politics presents a detailed intertextual study of the complex relationship between the lifework of Anna Freud and the legacy of Sigmund Freud, the singular figure who played many roles in her life: father, teacher, mentor — and psychoanalyst. Since this is a father-daughter relationship that has been repeatedly and comprehensively explored in the existing scholarship, Stewart-Steinberg demarcates from the outset what her project will not do. It will not be a biography of Anna Freud’s life, nor will it focus on an analysis of “her personal intentions and motivations” (2). Moreover, it will not offer readers an assessment of the daughter’s “relative loyalty or not to the psychoanalytic cause” of her father, nor provide a history of her wars with two major implacable opponents: Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan (2–3).

What, then, does concern the author of this volume? and how does she delineate her contribution to an already crowded field? The aspects of Anna Freud’s work that serve as the focal point of Impious Fidelity are not initially transparent. As Stewart-Steinberg somewhat broadly puts it, her interest lies in Anna Freud’s “defense of the ego for a viable, democratic existence” (3). However, after several reformulations of this statement, a significantly innovative thesis does come into view. In Stewart-Steinberg’s well-grounded judgment, Anna Freud’s lifelong project was to safeguard and maintain the ego, an especially vulnerable psychical agency in the aftermaths of World War II and the Holocaust. A traumatized and/or irrational human subject, as Stewart-Steinberg argues, undermines democracy and abets totalitarian institutions and regimes. That is why Anna Freud was so intent on — and so rigorously devoted to the cause of — seeking “adequate defenses for the ego in order to create stable democratic institutions, whether these be states, schools, or psychoanalytic institutions” (5). In this respect, Stewart-Steinberg finds her subject’s psychoanalytic project admirable in its humanitarian political commitments.

But therein also lies the proverbial rub. In advancing the vital necessity for the staunch defense and shoring up of the ego through her theoretical writings, as well as through her own analytic practice, Anna Freud was often perceived by members of the psychoanalytic community as betraying the fundamental discovery of her father: the unconscious. She could not help but be aware of the allegations and, at times, the vituperative charges of betrayal brought against her. Controversy constantly accompanied her independent lines of thought. (As a student of Lacan’s writings and, to a lesser extent, of Klein’s, I was occasionally struck by the oppositional rage she aroused.) Consequently, as Stewart-Steinberg demonstrates in this study, Anna Freud’s lifework became a delicate balancing act between two competing claims: fidelity to the teachings of her father and allegiance to her deeply-held belief in the urgency of shifting the psychoanalytic emphasis away from unconscious processes (the Id) to conscious defenses (the Ego).

How, then, could the daughter honor and obey the “Father of the Law,” in Lacanian terms, without compromising her personal and professional integrity? How could she uphold his faith without abnegating and abandoning hers? The means she conceived (or, rather, contrived) to resolve this bind was “always in her father’s name — to construct a form of democratic politics founded in the stable and therefore viable defense of the ego.” It is this modus operandi that Stewart-Steinberg chooses to designate, oxymoronically, “impious fidelity.” Anna Freud, she argues, “entered psychoanalytic history with a certain burden, with the (perhaps self-imposed) demand of a ‘piety’ that nonetheless always verges . . . on the edges of the ‘impious’” (3–4). The problems raised by this central tension, which may be summarily formulated as the question of how-far-can-you-go-without-leaving-the-fold, are the explicit focus of Stewart-Steinberg’s discussion in the four chapters of her book.

Chapter One, “A Wider Social Stage,” interrogates two main...