It is now 30 years since Anna Freud died, and the question of her place in the history of psychoanalysis - and of the ongoing influence of her work on our field - is still uncertain. Robert Wallerstein (1984, p. 66) once described her 1936 book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, as ‘perhaps the single most widely read book in our professional literature’, even including the works of her father. But her writings are not widely referenced by contemporary psychoanalytic practitioners, and her influence on training (especially in the UK, where the Anna Freud Centre child psychotherapy training closed in 2009) has decreased noticeably.

The chance to re-evaluate Anna Freud's ideas is therefore a welcome one; and the opportunity to see her actually delivering a lecture in the library at