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Anna Freud was born in Vienna in 1895 and died in London on October 9th, 1982, shortly before her 87th birthday. Even though hers was a long life, her achievements would suffice to fill several lifetimes. She had lived through two world wars and in mid-life had to establish herself in a new country.
Her biographer does justice to the many-faceted and complex personality of her subject. She presents a portrait of Anna Freud which is illuminating and which rings true. There is a welcome absence of speculation about Anna Freud's personal life, nor is the reader offered “wild interpretations” about what Anna Freud called “her honourable inner life”. She adheres scrupulously to verifiable sources.
The central theme of this book is Anna Freud's intellectual creativity. The author has tried to tell “how Sigmund and Martha Freud's youngest child, jealous of psychoanalysis, became not only her father's successor and, in her own right, her generation's most scientifically exact and wide-ranging theoretical and clinical contributor, but also a woman whose life was, through and through, psychoanalytic”. Psychoanalysis is also the method the author chooses to describe this “life and work”. Young-Bruehl's formulations are based on the theories about creativity first formulated by Freud and later elaborated by Kris and Greenacre, and these are spelt out in the postscript. In the early formulations, great intellectual creativity was considered to be characterised by virtuosity of day dreaming “in youth and in maturity by an equal admixture of femininity and masculinity and activity and passivity”. Whether the reader will agree with the theoretical formulations concerning the origins of Anna Freud's creativity, her achievements speak for themselves and thankfully Anna Freud's own voice comes through in all its clarity and lucidity in this book.
The story of Anna Freud's life is at the same time the history of psychoanalysis, and she herself considered it to be her twin with which she h