You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
These days, fewer and fewer psychoanalytic papers are anchored in drive theory. Metapsychology has moved to the periphery of the psychoanalytic stage as perspectives of self and of object gain increasing adherents. Structural theory is under attack from an unexpected quarter: one of it strongest past proponents, Charles Brenner, is calling for analysts to move beyond the ego and the id. Under these circumstances, it is timely to review and reconsider Freud's seminal contributions through the eyes of Anna Freud.
The Harvard Lectures, transcribed tapes of lectures Anna Freud gave at Harvard forty years ago, provide the material for us to do so. This is a gem of a book, skillfully edited and annotated by Joseph Sandler, with an introduction by Talcott Parsons. Its format reminds me of Douglas Ingram's Final Lectures, Karen Horney's lectures on technique. Both volumes convey a sense of the lecturers and their teaching styles. A striking similarity between Horney and Anna Freud in these works is the use of clear, simple, and jargon-free language. Anna Freud's words are geared to an audience of educated laypeople. The purpose of her lectures was to introduce Harvard undergraduates to child development from a psychoanalytic point of view. She covered the basics of the unconscious, the topographical model, the structural model, and psychosexual development. All of this could be dry. But her style speaks to the audience at the level of common experience, so that even the most skeptical of listeners (or readers) could come away with an appreciation of the value of psychoanalytic concepts.
The many examples she uses to illustrate her ideas are convincing. Anna Freud never gets polemical. Her approach is practical. The purpose of theory is to organize a set of facts. When it fails to do so, it must be altered.