Anna Freud: Gedichte - Prosa - Übersetzungen, edited and introduced by Brigitte Spreitzer; (Wien-Köln-Weimar:  Böhlau Verlag, 2014;  364 pp.) The Interwoven Lives of Sigmund, Anna and W. Ernest Freud, by Daniel Benveniste (New York:  International Psychoanalytic Books, 2015;  668 pp.)

The publication of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography of Anna Freud in 1988 alerted the Director of Sigmund Freud Archives Inc. to the fact that the original manuscripts of the poems cited in that book were only to be found in the archives of the Freud Museum, London. Anxious that these papers, together with other holographs still in London, should be housed in the Library of Congress archives, he made official arrangements for their transfer to the United States. What followed, thanks to the account of an actual witness, has implanted in me this pseudo-memory image: the spectacle of a file full of Anna's wayward verses being handed over to a beefy, crew-cut Marine sent by the American Embassy to escort them on the first stage of their journey home to the Freud Archives in Washington.

There is an incongruity between power (whether wielded by its military, political or cultural myrmidons) and the vulnerable intimacy of confessional verse. Leafing through Brigitte Spreitzer's edition of Anna Freud's complete poetical and literary works, I pick up an echo of that archival handover. The book is attractively produced by Böhlau Verlag: Spreitzer's introduction, editing and critical apparatus are meticulous and exemplary.