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I would like to begin my laudation on this occasion in which the doctor philosophiae honoris causa of Frankfurt University is being presented to Miss Anna Freud, with a quotation from her own speech when she received the honorary doctorate from Jefferson Medical College in 1964:
After extending my interest from adult analysis to child analysis and from clinical to theoretical problems, I also turned to the various applications of analysis. Beginning in Vienna, and continuing in England and the United States, I tried to select from analytic knowledge what can be useful for education, for teaching, for paediatrics, for the law. That, in short, is my curriculum vitae. Measured in time, it comprises a working period of approximately forty-five years.’ ( The Writings of Anna Freud, Vol. 5, p. 515)
This brief and modest account covers an imposing life-work, the effects of which, on the cultural and scientific life of our times, are inestimable.
When I went back to Anna Freud's works in preparation for today's ceremony…I frequently came across the notion she held of herself as being the advocate or guardian of the heritage of her father. This can readily be understood as the starting point of her life's work since she was—and I quote from R.W. Clark's biography of Freud—not only nurse, secretary and unfailing support…she was also, in view of her preeminence as an analyst, an almost natural successor to leadership of the cause’. In my view this does not capture the personal motive which makes Anna Freud's life and work comprehensible in its full significance. By being ‘the guardian of the heritage of the father’ Anna Freud was well placed to fulfil the aims conveyed in the title of Peters’ biography of her, ‘A Life for the Child’—which, I think, should be called more accurately ‘The Advocate of the Child’—namely