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Any book with a discussion between Joseph Sandler and Anna Freud excites psychoanalysts, since we were introduced to Anna Freud's book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense quite early in our education. The concepts she discussed in 1936 became part of psychiatric and psychoanalytic language and spread into colloquial talk. How often have we heard people speak of their projections, intellectualizations, and repressions as though these unconscious ripostes of the ego describe their motivations.
The atmosphere in our culture surrounding the publication of this book is particularly cynical towards psychoanalysis. Peter Medewar, with the prestige of a Nobel prize winner, writes in his collection of essays, Pluto's Republic, “Psychoanalysis won't do.… It is an end-product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin, no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks of twentieth century thought.” Anna Freud appears to reflect her awareness of this and of her father's theory referred to as a “myth” when she replies to Sandler, “If nothing worse is ever said about us.…”
The book stands not only as a detailed exploration of her 1936 book but as a defense of the entire Freudian model. The format is delightful to read. After a précis is given of each of Anna Freud's chapters in the 1936 book, a series of discussions follow between Sandler and Anna Freud about the meaning of her concepts, with added responses by members of the Hempstead Clinic. The elasticity of Freud's metapsychology becomes a leitmotif of the book. The discussions revolve around drive theory as a basic given in humans. The topographical model and the structural model are personified in military metaphors. The id is ever searching for gratification. Sandler reiterates the importance of wishes as drive derivatives. The ego is a composite of functions, battered from within, facing the onslaughts of the objective world and the attacks of a h