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Rose Edgcumbe's outstanding book should prove immensely valuable to a wide audience—for clinicians in a position to evaluate and treat disturbed children, those interested in or teaching development in a psychoanalytic context, and adult therapists in search of a clinically based developmental framework within which to understand their patients. As Edgcumbe says, this isn't a biography of Anna Freud, who died in 1983. Rather, it is a concise developmental biography of a
significant and fertile stream of psychoanalytic theory and technique and their applications, a stream that originated with Anna Freud, an adult analyst who was among the first to explore the possibilities of psychoanalytic work with children. Anna Freud's frame of reference, predominantly within the evolving contemporary structural model (see, e.g., Sandler et al. 1997), survives translation into other perspectives remarkably well, should one be motivated to undertake it. Much of her work has been incorporated into the thinking and practice of psychoanalysts everywhere—though, it is true, in different proportions and not always with awareness of the source. Edgcumbe's book is particularly relevant today, when children the world over are subject to seriously deleterious, if not traumatic, influences on their development. As a guide to the thinking and work of the psychoanalyst who has made the most significant, practical, and comprehensive contributions to our understanding of the broad range of human development, it is unsurpassed.
The book is remarkable also for its successful integration of the many historical, political, and psychoanalytic constituents of that fertile stream, and for Edgcumbe's clear and eminently readable style, reminiscent of Anna Freud herself. However, when discussing reasons why Anna Freud's work is not better known, Edgcumbe does not consider her elegantly simple writing style as being paradoxically less interesting to many who equate obscurity with profundity. She does pr