Biography

Anna Freud: Her Life And Her Bio Anna Freud: A Biography(Young-Bruehl, 1988) has been incubating in my mind for more than five years. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's Anna Freud has met the test of the first eight years after publication by enabling us to better understand the person and her contributions as we celebrate the centenary of Anna Freud's birth.

In this scholarly volume, Anna Freud's life is set forth biographically and historically in two sections titled Vienna and London. The individual chapters in title and scope move from biographical narrative to a societal-historical context, and to an unfolding of the intellectual history of psychoanalysis. Throughout, there is a balanced focus on Anna Freud as her father's daughter and intellectual heir, and on her own original contributions to and shaping of the intellectual content and historical aspects of psychoanalysis.

In describing and documenting Anna Freud's birth, childhood, adolescence, and later adult life, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl has engaged in a labor of love, rigorously dedicated to scholarship of the highest order. As she states, in the section on Acknowledgements and Notes On Sources:

Finding the preexisting context for my work to be so full of difficulties on the one hand, and so mapless on the other, I adopted several rules. I have offered here as much primary documentation as possible for each factual or interpretive statement that I make about Anna Freud's life—and where there are holes in the documentation, I say so; I have not used any statements in existing biographies of Freud or Anna Freud for which no primary documentation was cited; statements in published sources that were based upon uncited interview material have been disregarded; statements made to me in interviews have not been used unless corroborated by at least one other interviewee. Published memoirs and reminiscences have been very valuable to this biography; but some, like the recent account of the Freud family's life constructed from i