You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
A third focal point for psychoanalysis was Berlin, prior to World War I, where Karl Abraham was also taking an interest in the observation and analysis of children. He had worked at the Burghölzli with Jung for a number of years and knew Jung’s daughter, Agathli, and was also conversant with the discussions taking place in Vienna and had heard of little Hans. It was therefore not surprising that he should undertake a close observation of his only daughter, Hilda. ‘On two occasions I have had to give her a glycerine enema. Since then she has told me every day that she doesn’t want another injection, but she says this without real affect and, on most occasions, even with a rather arch smile. She does not show any other anal-erotic tendencies[!]’, he writes to Freud on 7 April 1909 (Freud and Abraham, 1965:77). Hilda was then 2 years and 4 months. Two months earlier, Abraham had questioned Freud about the history of a little 6-year-old girl who engaged in reciprocal masturbation with her brother by touching genitals with the feet.
As to Hilda, we know from her biography of her father that this observation was just the beginning of a more complete study that Abraham was to undertake on his daughter. To our knowledge, it is the first document in which the person actually concerned recounts an analytical history: being analysed by one’s own father. The fact that Hilda Abraham was a training psychoanalyst (British Psycho-Analytical Society) perhaps explains this particular case.
This undertaking ‘could give rise to some apprehension’ says Anna Freud in the Preface; but she was talking about undertaking the biography of her own father, not the circumstance in which a father had analysed his daughter. She does not allude to this at all; which is understandable, given her almost complete silence on the subject of her own analysis with her father.
So it would appear that this observation of the child started very early on. The 1909 note quoted above does not seem to be part of H