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One of the late Rose Edgcumbe's legacies not long before she died, was to complete this summary of Anna Freud's work. As a student, and subsequently a colleague, she was delighted to be given the opportunity to contribute to the
wider dissemination and clarification of Anna Freud's ideas. In so doing, she used her own gifts to produce an eminently readable and informative book.
Why is Anna Freud not better known? This is one of the questions that Rose Edgcumbe asks in the introduction, and the publication of the book goes some way towards bringing Anna Freud's work to a wider audience. It was a welcome arrival. Its publication fills what was a major gap in psychoanalytic literature.
Rose Edgcumbe was well placed to provide an overall description of Anna Freud's contributions to theory and technique in psychoanalytic practice, and her impact on the public's attitude to the emotional lives of children. Rose Edgcumbe describes with liveliness, coherence and clarity the far-reaching web of Anna Freud's working life. The book is approachable, but does not avoid tackling difficult issues. It is accessible and could be easily read by non-psychoanalytic but interested professionals. However, at the same time it may be of interest to the more technical reader who wishes to understand more on such thorny issues as the integration of drive theory with the structural model, the role of object relations in Anna Freud's thinking, and the use of ‘developmental help’ in psychoanalytic practice.
At the heart of the book is the weight that Anna Freud gave to the detailed observation of children. Rose Edgcumbe makes clear her view that the foundations of Anna Freud's work, clinical and theoretical, lay in the fine detail of the observation of individual children's development. The book devotes a chapter to the summaries of the hundreds of observations of children from the War Nurseries. Here we are led through the careful, systematic and open-minded gathering of the evidence that would