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As I contemplated writing this article I sometimes wondered why I had accepted the difficult assignment of speaking about my former analyst, Anna Freud. The task is difficult because my feelings are by no means entirely positive—nor indeed are they strongly negative. Even the word ambivalent does not apply because it is as if—and I say this with no wish to be arrogant, but merely to describe my existing feeling—I have outgrown her. The extent of my detachment was made palpably clear to me as I sat down to begin writing this. It occurred to me that I should know the publication date of Anna Freud's classic work, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. It appeared shortly after my husband and I returned to this country after five years of psychoanalytic study in Vienna. I wanted to confirm the date of the book's publication and so I turned to my bookshelves. I found the volume, but to my amazement it was in German. Its yellowed pages had been thoroughly read; there were underlinings and marginal comments. The date of publication was 1936. We had left Vienna at the end of November 1934. As I held the book with its frayed binding in my hands I had a feeling of estrangement from the memories it evoked. This, it seems to me, is partly due to the fact that the subject matter of Anna Freud's book, the defense mechanisms, has become public domain. The names of the defense mechanisms have become as much a part of our language as the Oedipus complex, and thus they fail to evoke personal memories and feelings. But in addition, the focus of my psychoanalytic orientation has changed. I no longer feel identified with classical psychoanalytic thought. Its literature and language seem remote to me. Needless to say, this was not always the case. In fact when my husband and I went to Vienna in 1930 I was full of enthusiasm for and curiosity