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For psychoanalysts, this is a daring and fascinating biography. As one who knew and worked with Anna Freud, I felt enormous admiration and respect for her. But she was a very reserved, private, sometimes haughty person to whom it was hard to feel close. This biography helped me to get to know her in a new way, to understand the emotional center of her life, the pain, the vulnerability, and the strengths that lay behind her public persona.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, philosopher, psychoanalytic candidate, and acclaimed biographer of Hannah Arendt, was chosen to write this life and given special access to thousands of letters carefully filed each year by Anna Freud. She decided to write not a more traditional, external, linear view of Anna Freud's life and accomplishments but rather to focus on recreating for us the inner journey which made these accomplishments possible. This seems entirely appropriate for the biography of a psychoanalyst. Young-Bruehl was able to take this approach only because Anna Freud herself, while unwilling to write an autobiography, left behind many accounts of her self-reflections and dreams, as well as all the letters.
Young-Bruehl believes the psychobiographer's charge is to present the evidence, but not to try to draw from it the "essence" of a human life. A biography is not a case history. As she has written elsewhere, for a biographer, unlike for an analyst, "there is no next session." The structure of the book is, however, akin to the psychoanalytic process, in that deeper and deeper layers of the personality are slowly revealed. We are first given an external account of Anna's childhood and early family life: her feelings of being left out, her jealousy of her sister, Sophie, her having been given over to the care of a baby nurse, Josephine. Yet we also hear from her father's letters that he admired the impish remarks of his little "Black Devil."
In adolescence, she seemed sad and troubled. The ambiguity of having an analyst-fat