In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Editor’s Introduction
  • Jennifer Stone

The Centenary of Anna Freud’s birth coincides with the birth of psychoanalysis. Anna Freud was born on December 3, 1895, at 19 Berggasse in Vienna. Little Annerl’s arrival in her father’s life follows closely on Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the royal road to the unconscious. Anna Freud remarks in 1978 that as a fetus in her mother’s womb, she participated as an unknowing witness to the birth of psychoanalysis since the secret of dreams was revealed to Freud during the family’s stay at Bellevue, a mansion in the Vienna woods, during the summer of 1895, four months before her own birth. Anna Freud also observes in 1954, in an essay on psychoanalysis and education, that the birth date of psychoanalytic child psychology is placed somewhere between the appearance of her father’s and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria (1893–95) and Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). The theoretical adumbration of the truth of infantile sexuality is to be followed, she states in 1966, in her short history of child analysis, by the practical development of child analytic therapy from 1926 onwards through their extensive collaborative work together with specialists in educational analysis or analytic education, in adolescents, in wayward youth, and in delinquency such as August Aichorn and Siegfried Bernfeld among others. Since 1905, when a phobia in a five-year-old boy, “Little Hans,” was first treated by psychoanalysis, the father acting as an intermediary between the child and analyst, Anna Freud asserts in 1945 that “child analysis as a therapeutic method has had a stormy and checkered career.”

This Centenary issue marks the enormous contribution of Anna Freud whose psychoanalytic diplomacy and unstinting generosity served to keep the increasingly unwieldy project of Freudian psychoanalysis on track. Her own career is anything but checkered and it is her profound understanding, dedication, and consistency that during her lifetime helped keep the [End Page 191] divisive sectarian storms at bay. Nowhere is she more lucid and true to her profound understanding of fundamental Freudian concepts than in 1941–45 during the so-called controversial discussions with Melanie Klein and her followers whose troubling misunderstanding of the basics of Freudian psychoanalysis—deviations around the Oedipus and castration complexes, the timing of ego formation, problems of analytic transference, and the diagnosis of psychosis—are still muddying the waters today. In the current crisis of the profession, a return to Anna Freud could arguably arrest the flight from classical analysis and provide the grounds for a reassessment of the purposes of the therapeutic enterprise in our age of managed health care; it could also most certainly provide some inspiring insights and practicable solutions as to how to cope with the narrowing rather than widening scope of indications for psychoanalysis. She also offers her wisdom in dealing with the crucial questions of the role of the psychoanalytic institutes and of the structure and nature of analytic training so as to combine the evident strengths of those candidates trained in the humanities with the traditional ethical qualities of the medical side of the profession. A return to Anna Freud might well then reinvigorate psychoanalysis as an interdisciplinary and diversified practice and theoretical project in which child and lay analysis are on equal footing with psychiatry, which, as history has shown, has depleted institutional training and the expansion of the field by exclusion of the most creative branches of psychoanalytic research and theoretical advance.

Anna Freud’s own exemplary biography indicates the redundancy of a purely medical training as “the seven years of dearth,” in Muriel Gardiner’s resonant phrase of 1962—a view that they both shared. Anna Freud’s development in 1936 of the theory of the ego and mechanisms of defence helps explain Sigmund Freud’s declared disregard, in The Question of Lay Analysis of 1926, for the conscious altruistic purposes involved in the practice of medicine, which is most often conducted at the sacrifice of the intellectual and philosophic dimensions of the original psychoanalytic enterprise. This special issue of American Imago, dedicated to Anna Freud’s Centenary, celebrates her certain title to being called Dr. Anna [End Page 192] Freud...

Share