Editorial

When Anna Freud died in 1982, shortly afterwards the special issue of the Bulletin of the Anna Freud Centre was published in her remembrance and in her honour. Most of the contributions came from people who had known her well - friends, colleagues, former students, and people who had followed her work closely, who had become friends of the Course and Clinic, and who came from many parts of the world. That special issue was a remarkable tribute, and one that it is quite impossible to replicate.

This month sees the centenary of her birth. A great deal was happening at the time that was to have important consequences on the development of psychoanalysis - the Studies on Hysteria, for example were published in the same year; and although Freud thought that his ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ was an aberration, it has proved a rich source for those historians who like to look back at the origins of some very important - even central - ideas that were only fully developed much later. But the reason why we honour the centenary of Anna Freud's birth with such pleasure and gratitude is through our knowledge that psychoanalysis would not be the same today without her immense contributions to our knowledge of child development, normal and abnormal, and through her many contributions to applied psychoanalysis -such as matters of family law, paediatrics, and education.

The contributors to this issue are all long-standing friends of the Centre who have long valued and respected Anna Freud's work; but they write from different points of view. Some have chosen to speak about their special memories of her, as in the case of Serge Lebovici and Riccardo Steiner. Jim Herzog has provided us with a clinical contribution of the type she would so greatly have valued, and his discussion of an analysis conducted largely through displacement, in circumstances where that approach was both wise and necessary, would certainly have won her approval. Sam Abrams has taken a remark she made in t