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Anna Freud is a joy of authenticity, fervor, and knowledge. Her writing is exquisite in the sense that she makes the complex simple and comprehensible. This is one reason why this volume of early writings, 1922 to 1935, is appropriate for the professional and nonprofessional alike.
The volume is brief, one hundred and eighty pages, and contains “Four Lectures on Child Analysis” , “Four Lectures on Psychoanalysis
for Teachers and Parents” , and four early papers. In the last section she includes her papers “Beating Phantasies and Daydreams” , “A Hysterical Symptom in a Child Two Years and Three Months” , “The Theory of Child Analysis” , and “Psychoanalysis and the Upbringing of the Young Child” . All the material in this volume is in its original form, but Freud has reworked the English translations.
The lectures on child analysis grew out of her experiences in the Hampstead Nurseries, heir to the Jackson Nursery in Vienna, but were not published until the end of World War II. These lectures were geared to create a more receptive attitude on the part of teachers and parents toward analytic information. Freud says that this article now requires revision, for a child analyst no longer works in such a vacuum and our increased knowledge of defense maneuvers can shorten the long introductory period which she has described. In the introduction she states emphatically that the child shows “a multitude of transference phenomena but does not develop a full blown transference neurosis as we see in the adult.”
In the first lecture of this series, she begins by describing some of her differences from the Kleinian approach. Melanie Klein takes the view that “Any disturbances in the intellectual or emotional development of the child can be resolved or at least favorably influenced by analysis.” Just the preceding year, the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society had recommended, “Analysis is appropriate only where a child has developed a genuine infantile neurosis.” Anna Freud's position dif