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The fifty-first volume of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child commemorates the one-hundredth birthday of Anna Freud, one of its founders. The first five articles in this compendium, by Clifford Yorke, Samuel Abrams, Peter Neubauer, Joseph and Sonja Goldstein, and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, are papers presented at a symposium at Yale University in honor of Ms. Freud's centenary in December 1995. Other papers comment on Anna Freud with regard to psychoanalytic theory as well as the theory of child development. These are followed by a series of clinical contributions and a section on applied child psychoanalysis.
Yorke reminds us of how aware Ms. Freud was of the fast-changing nature of the child's “average expectable environment” in the latter part of the twentieth century (p. 21). Not only did she flesh out the mechanisms of defense discovered by her father, but went on to make a contribution of inestimable richness based on her intensive and extensive work with young and ever younger children, culminating in a theory of developmental lines and the construction of the Developmental Profile.
Writing about Anna Freud's theory and technique, Jill Miller tells us that in assessing the level of development a child has attained one has to ask the (seemingly simple) question, “is he where he needs to be and what is holding him up?” (p. 149) Miller tells us of Ms. Freud's ongoing concerns about whether early deficits are treatable and reversible and, if so, by what means.
Neubauer emphasizes how Anna Freud's experience led her to conclude that child analysis was concerned with treatment beyond neurosis by quoting from her 1974 paper to this effect:
If we accept the view that childhood psychopathology has a twofold causation, one rooted in the conflicts, defense, and compromise formations, the other in the developmental processes, we have no reason to believe that the same therapeutic measures will be equally effective for both.… But so far as the developmental progress itself is