Editor's Introduction

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 . 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