Memories of Anna Freud and of Dorothy Burlingham

Abstract

Gina Bon narrates her recollections of her time as secretary to Anna Freud (and to Dorothy Burlingham) from approximately 1970 to the time of Anna Freud’s death in 1982. She accounts for the profound effect Anna Freud’s life and work had on many people. Bon describes Anna Freud’s method of dealing with an enormous volume of correspondence, dictation, and discussion; she provides insights into her organized mode which led to her writing innumerable papers. There is a sketch of Dorothy Burlingham’s unobtrusive and special function as Anna Freud’s companion and intellectual collaborator. The narrative is replete with Anna Freud’s witty interchanges and wise remarks together with her evident compassion and real interest in her interlocutors. Previously unpublished letters from Anna Freud and from Dorothy Burlingham are reproduced here. Bon provides evidence of Anna Freud’s copious energies and many inspiring gifts and gives a portrait of a woman whose strength of mind and “bright and undiminished spirit” challenged to the end the trials of her mortal illness.

There is a large desk (correctly described as a “secretaire”) in my small workroom. It used to belong to Anna Freud, and she gave it to one of her staff when her work with the concentration camp children was completed. ¹ I inherited it from her. I went to retrieve three bulging folders from its recesses to refresh my recollections from my time as secretary to Anna Freud. I discovered that their contents were not in any kind of order. Letters, reprints, drafts of papers and papers, Minutes from Conferences, headed in Miss Freud’s beautiful writing—in one instance, “No corr. Very good. (I seem to have talked an awful lot.) A. Freud”—and the last three Shorthand-Notebooks, the very last with the note on its cover “10.2.82–9.10.82.”

There was a letter, in reply to a personal letter from me informing her of Miss Freud’s death, from a young person who had been in analysis as an adolescent with Miss Freud. She had written a long letter, and it arrived too late:

Thank you for writing about the last letter I wrote her, it was so long. I didn’t know whether to send it knowing how weak she was, but I just wanted her to know how much she had done and how much I loved her. I don’t think she needed to answer it. I think we both knew. She once said to me when we were talking about death: “My dear when you reach a certain age you get tired, I don’t want to live for ever.” Nothing in the world was worse than losing her, except thinking she would be alive and not happy. . . .

It was one token—to me perhaps the most touching of many—of the profound effect Anna Freud’s life and work has had, on countless people and on many levels.

Each of my notebooks contained “300 pages, Spiral bound, Feint ruled.” (This really amounted to 600 pages, since one writes on both sides of a page.) Any one of these notebooks was used up within three—at most four—months. They contained only Miss Freud’s correspondence. I kept separate notebooks for Minutes of Conferences and Meetings of Study Groups, which were used up at an even faster rate. Her dictation was every secretary’s dream: while observing whether one managed to keep up, the clarity of her thought (or argument) and her spare and elegant style were uninterrupted by unnecessary pauses, deletions, second thoughts: no “sorry, we’ll have to start again. . . . What did I say in this last paragraph?” My last notebook covers the period while Miss Freud worked with Al Solnit and Joe and Sonja Goldstein on In the Best Interests of the Child (1986), to which she had all but completed her own contribution. My writing is very shaky on March 18, 1982: this was the first of a number of hospital visits, and later visits to Miss Freud’s home. I was badly shaken by seeing such a bright...