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On Saturday, 4th November, at the end of the 1995 Colloquium, as a special celebratory event to mark the centenary of Anna Freud's birth, Ruth Rosen, one of Britain's leading poetry and prose performers, presented a touching dramatized portrait of Anna Freud devised by her from letters, notes, reports and a variety of other sources. Ruth Rosen felicitously combined her two identities, that of actress and of analyst's wife (her husband is Dr Ismond Rosen), to offer an attentive audience of over 130 analysts a performance of expressive intelligence. We are grateful to her for allowing us to publish this short anthology in honour of Anna Freud.
January 7th, 1913
Dear Papa
I got your letter today and wanted to write you anyway, to thank you for your last letter, which made me very happy. I am now quite well again, and I hope that whatever I had will not recur - I wondered a great deal what it was, for I am not really sick. It irrupts in me, somehow, and then I am very tired and must worry about all kinds of things, which at other times are just a matter of course: about my being here, and that I do nothing all day long when I am not sick, and similar things. I am no longer embroidering Sophie's tablecloth, and it is unpleasant when I think about that, for I would like to have finished it. Naturally, I think rather often about Sophie's wedding, but I am indifferent about Max, because he is a complete stranger to me; I don't really like him, but I am certainly not jealous of him. It is not really nice to say it, but I am glad that Sophie is getting married, because the unending quarrel between us was horrible for me. It was no matter for her, because she did not care for me,