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I am grateful for the opportunity of reviewing my thinking on the subject of Dorothy Burlingham's relationship with Anna Freud. Although my biography of Dorothy (Burlingham, 1989) has been fixed in print, my thinking of course continues to evolve, and, when I was preparing this, I was curious to see what would emerge. The difference, it appears, is one of emphasis or degree. Having published the facts of my grandmother's life, and my interpretation of them, in an unsparing though, I trust, not unsympathetic fashion, there seems to be more room for compassion.
Among Sigmund Freud's collection of antiquities is a Roman bottle of Mediterranean, possibly Cypriot, origin and nearly 2000 years old. According to Lucilla Burns of the British Museum, it is
chiefly remarkable for its brilliant iridescent sheen; the underlying color is basically greenish gray, but it is streaked and swirled with mother-of-pearl, peacock blue and green, mauve, orange, pale blue turquoise, gold, and red, all manifesting themselves in turn and in different combinations as the vessel is looked at under differing light. (Gamwell and Wells, 1989, p. 121)
This object is not anomalous to Freud's collection; there are over a hundred examples of ancient glass, many bearing this unique property characteristic of its decay. It was, however, the ideas embodied by these artworks not their aesthetic qualities that primarily attracted Freud. The beauty caused by slow oxidization did not prompt Freud to purchase the bottle; rather it was the evidence of its antiquity, and its cultural clues. Freud's beginnings as a collector in the 1890s paralleled the beginnings of psychoanalysis itself quite simply because in ancient art was a compelling metaphor for his own discoveries. Like archaeologists, Freud and his followers would “bring to the light of day after their long burial the priceless though mutilated relics of antiquity” (Freud, 1905, p. 12). In other words, to the Freudian mind, the ancient art object was lik