Introduction

In this fifty-first volume of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, we commemorate scientifically and clinically the one-hundredth birthday of Anna Freud, who, with Ernst Kris and Heinz Hartmann, founded this annual repository of writings on child psychoanalysis and child development. (The voice and legacy of Heinz Hartmann were acknowledged in Volume 49 [1994], and we are contemplating a commemorative volume to rediscover the voice and legacy of Ernst Kris on his centenary, in the year 2000.) The editor-founders, all three of them originally from Vienna, were an endowment from the diaspora created by the Nazis to the United Kingdom and to the United States. In the first volume, published in 1945, they defined the field: “The contributions of psychoanalysis to the study of the child cover many areas. In therapy the range extends from child analysis to child guidance and group work; in theory, from the basic problems of genetic psychology to those concerned with the interrelation of culture and the upbringing of the child” (p. 9). They also noted: “The annual is an Anglo-American venture. We hope that in following volumes we may include contributions from other countries.”

On December 2, 1995, one day before the hundredth anniversary of her birth, Anna Freud was remembered at Yale University by a day-long scientific meeting (“Anna Freud at Yale”) devoted to aspects of her contributions to psychoanalytic child development and their applications. The program of that meeting constitutes the first section of this book. I had the privilege of introducing this meeting with the following speech.