Towards the end of her life Anna Freud was increasingly upset by the various and accumulating attempts to write psychoanalytic history: Roazen, Eduardo Weiss and of course Jeffrey Masson. All her life she had been guardian of the temple for the faithful for this had also been her first testing in the fire of psychoanalytic debate back in the mid-twenties when she felt called upon to sustain an ‘orthodox’ opposition to the form of child analysis that had gradually been developed in Berlin by Melanie Klein, and in London by Nina Searl and others. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, in this new biography of Anna Freud, has captured remarkably well the lifelong uncertainty that Anna Freud had over her own identity: she was a prolongation of the dying and dead senior Freud, or was she a psychoanalytic adventurer in her own right?