Ed Richard Ekins, Ruth Freeman
Penguin Books, £8.99, pp 304 
ISBN 0 14 026814 6
———————
Rating: ★★★
The youngest of Freud’s six children, Anna’s life was inextricably linked with psychoanalysis from the start. By the age of 5, her dreams were being used by papa Freud to illustrate his work. As a teenager, she immersed herself in his writing and attended his lecture course on psychoanalysis. She was 23 years old when she entered analysis with her own father. Her first publication came a few years later with the title Beating Fantasies and Daydreams. This explored the theme of sexualised “phantasies” as substitutes for incestuous wishes between father and daughter.
So a pioneer? Yes, with daddy later referring to her as “my faithful Antigone—Anna.” A highly dubious compliment given that Antigone’s task was to take care of her brother’s corpse—killed through fratricidal hatred.
Anna’s training as a teacher grounded her in the real environment in which children spend most of their waking lives, and I think this gave her a sense of moderation and balance, which pervades her writing. She could see that theoretical models were both constraining and enabling. This gave her a healthy reluctance to over-pathologise, and, compared with her Kleinian rivals, she was also more practical and cautious about concepts of transference in rapidly growing children.
Forced to flee Vienna in 1938, she settled in London and established the Hampstead War Nurseries. This “hands on” experience shines through her work, and the theorising never runs ahead of itself. It is worth reading her alongside Bowlby and Klein to obtain a perspective on her position. She remained pessimistic about psychoanalysis providing a patient with what was never there in the first place. Hence her scepticism about applications of this form of therapy to psychosis.
Her writings show a peculiar mixture of the radical and the conservative. I found her radicalism best illustrated in the section on adolescence. Here she argues lucidly and gives good examples of, and makes meaningful, adolescents’ attacks on their parents. Most people pay attention only to children’s and young people’s aggressive and destructive states. We ignore their quiet and profound emotional distress. Anna Freud makes us think about their inhibitions, obsessions, and anxieties, which are the moulding forces of their development. Many parents are only too familiar with the scenario that no matter how hard they try with their teenage son or daughter, it tends to increase their negative responses to concern.
Anna Freud argues that help should be given by analytically trained educators. I cannot help but place alongside this assertion the fact that she was in analysis with her own father. At times she sounds despondent about analytic therapy with adolescents. I think adolescents need to experience an encounter with the person of the therapist as well as “the process” of the therapy. This is usually more guarded against in classic approaches. However, she sees a way forward with residential treatments such as therapeutic communities and other residential settings. Her strength lies in that she does not claim psychoanalysis as a panacea.