Reading Anna Freud's letters to Eva Rosenfeld, written for the most part between 1925 and 1932, one enters an exciting world in which psychoanalytic ideas and activities flourished in a most human and sometimes tumultuous environment. That the entry is into a forbidden area may add to the appeal; for Anna Freud vehemently opposed exposure of her and her father's private domain. Unlike Sigmund Freud, who revealed much about himself in The Interpretation of Dreams, Anna's analytic articles were scientifically impersonal. Only recently has it been discovered that her early paper on beating fantasies focused on her personal analysis.

The book is much more than an annotated collection of letters. Eightynine of the two hundred and ten pages contain the correspondence. The rest comprises a two-chapter introduction and a commentary by Peter Heller, the editor. In the introduction, Günther Bittner, a psychoanalyst and historian, writes about Anna Freud, while Victor Ross describes his mother, Eva Rosenfeld. Heller is best known to psychoanalysts for his