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Anna Freud is that paradox among psychoanalysts: a personage at once historical and contemporary whose lifecycle gathers into its folds the origins and early development of analysis, the theoretical trials and institutional tribulations of the second and third generations of analytic history, and the challenges and controversies—clinical, organizational, and social—that continue to shape analytic discourse into the present. It is because she is Freud's daughter and her life not only spans, but has helped shape, so many decades of analytic history, that the temptation is great to frame her life in terms of her father's mission. Taken in this sense, Miss Freud's life takes as its major signposts her unswerving devotion to her father and his work, her careful extensions of this work in ways agreeable to him, and her cautionary attentiveness to the organizational growth of psychoanalysis in the decades following his death. Add to these signposts Miss Freud's analysis by her father, her presumably chaste maidenhood in the decades thereafter, her lifelong attachment to Dorothy Burlingham and the Burlingham family, her selfless devotion to Freud following the onset of his cancer in 1923, her protracted dialogue with Melanie Klein over the foundations and technique of child analysis, and her pioneering applications of analysis to child care during World War II and thereafter, and one knows Anna Freud as most analysts have been content to know her.
It is because it is so natural to view Miss Freud's life in just this way that analysts and scholars alike owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. For in Anna Freud: A Biography, we finally have a substantive appreciation of Anna Freud that breaks out of a hackneyed trajectory that