'The Voice of the Intellect is a Soft One'—A Review of The Writings of Anna Freud, Volume IV, 1945–1956

This collection of papers offers the reader a rare set of experiences. The essays in this volume were written during the years 1945 to 1956, a period in psychoanalysis when important new developments and divergences were becoming increasingly apparent in the psychoanalytic movement. Yet Anna Freud's vast range of interests and concerns, her keen discernment of what is central and what is peripheral, makes this group of papers relevant to the struggles of psychoanalysis today (Lustman, 1967). The author's clarity, simplicity and modesty of style, plus her muted humanitarianism, offer the serious reader an opportunity not only to observe, but to participate in the growth and development in psychoanalysis of that period. Controversial issues, misunderstandings and unknowns are confronted squarely, not with polemical zeal but with reason and patience. By the use of carefully selected clinical fragments and theoretical formulations, Anna Freud attempts to build an organized and dynamic picture of the development of man into a whole and living human being.

Anna Freud's unpretentious style and her lucid, systematic thinking make her constructions and hypotheses deceptively easy to follow. As a result, those with a readiness to acquiescence may mistakenly believe that the material under discussion is obvious or already well known. Those who confuse opaqueness with profundity, or who are contentious, will equate comprehensibility and open-mindedness with superficiality. In any event, as Anna Freud describes clinical phenomena or constructs theoretical formulations, they seem so patently clear that complexity, controversy and conflict seem remote. Only later reflection and retrospective evaluation make the reader aware of how many basic areas in the field of psychoanalysis have been freshly dealt with, clarified and amplified (Calef, 1970). I believe Freud's statements in reference to the difficulty in ridding oneself of illusions are remarkably apt in describing the