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In the spring of 1966 Anna Freud was invited to give a lecture at the first meeting of the American Association for Child Psychoanalysis in Topeka, Kansas. The theme she chose was: ‘A brief history of child psychoanalysis’. ‘It is logical’, she said, ‘that when psychoanalysts pursue a new venture they start by looking at their own history. They thus grasp the importance of past experience in present actions and in what they expect from the future.’ In this lecture she indicated what she thought child psychoanalysis was. She described her work at the Hampstead Clinic in London, where ‘students are trained in psychoanalysis which is a method of treatment, a means of investigation, a theory which calls for critical examination and expansion, a body of knowledge which can be applied to a good many needs of the community…. The choice of the aspect or aspects of psychoanalysis [he or she will study] throughout his or her future career is up to the individual’ (‘A short history of child psychoanalysis’, in The Writings of Anna Freud, 1965-80, vol. 7:48–58).
The ideas and work of Anna Freud are not very well known in France. Her global vision of the psychoanalyst, i.e. someone who, having studied a new science, can throw new light on human behaviour and is not put off by the interpersonal side of psychoanalytical treatment, won her only incomprehension and criticism. Her conception of child psychoanalysis was of course intimately bound up with her personality (she even made a study of herself, as her father had done before her), and with the personal, professional and social choices she had made on reaching adulthood. As her biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (1988) recounts, Anna Freud was almost certainly much influenced at that time by what her father had said in 1918 in Lines of Advance in Psycho-Analytic Therapy (Freud, 1919a [1918]). Talking about the future, Freud imagined that one day
it is possible to foresee that at some time or other the conscience of society will