Personal Tributes

In response to the invitation to contribute to this very special issue, I can only focus on a few well-known facts of Anna Freud's life in order to comment on her position in history. For while her death has evoked much individual mourning, we must all thank fate for letting us witness the uniqueness of her life and the dedication with which she rounded out and complemented the role ascribed to her by her life-history-and by history.

Youngest daughter of a great father who came to need her in his most creative endeavours and then also in his most helpless states of physical suffering, responsive student of his newly created method of healing and of observing the dynamics of unconscious motivation, she proved prepared to complement his most complex conclusions by systematically demonstrating the early traces of human conflict in the most telling behaviour of children.

But let me begin with an episodic item from the way in which Anna Freud's life-history touched mine professionally. She conducted my training psychoanalysis in Berggasse 19. Therefore, to me, as to a now diminishing number of survivors of my kind, what comes to mind as I look back are the front door and stairway leading up to the Freuds' apartment—and then the ever-welcoming Paula Fichtl responding to my ring and showing me to the waiting room shared by Sigmund and Anna Freud. On occasion, Freud's next patient or visitor might be waiting there, and I would see the old ‘Professor’, with a formal bow, invite that person into his study, having briefly bowed to me as well. And then Anna Freud would open her door for me.

Readers acquainted with this setting will remember the atmosphere of utter privacy, on the one hand, and of a kind of historicity, on the other, both evoked by the closeness of these two studies and the closure of these doors. And here I mean the meditative style that marked the ‘fifty minutes’ of almost daily psychoanalysis and the tangible historical meaning of the most minute dyn