Anna Freud (Magill Book Reviews)

Although Anna Freud was the youngest of the six children of the famous originator of psychoanalysis, she was clearly the most important heir to her father’s intellectual legacy. Indeed, as this enlightening biography makes clear, much of Anna Freud’s life was devoted to her father--sustaining him physically during his long battle with cancer and defending his doctrine against the many revisionists who insisted on their own brand of Freudianism after his death.

Among the many significant elements of Anna Freud’s life which Elisabeth Young-Bruehl scrupulously outlines in this highly detailed biography are her need to gain the approval of her father; her psychoanalysis by her father; her escape with him from the Nazis; her development of child analysis; her battle with Melanie Klein and the Kleinian brand of analysis in England; and her relationship with the American Dorothy Burlingham and their work with the Hampstead War Nursery in London.

Although Young-Bruehl (well-known for her earlier biography of Hannah Arendt) is familiar enough with the theory and practice of psychoanalysis to engage in wide-ranging interpretations of the wealth of data Anna Freud left behind, she exercises admirable restraint, resisting amateurish analysis and allowing Freud to speak for herself; the book is filled with generous quotations from Anna Freud’s letters, self-analyses, dream interpretations, and manuscripts.

This is not a particularly dramatic biography, but then Anna Freud’s was not a particularly dramatic life; rather it was a life with a powerful single focus. What readers get here is a carefully detailed and nonsensational picture of a significant contributor to the history of psychoanalysis and thus a significant contributor to the history of modern thought.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LXXXV, September 15, 1988, p. 109.

Boston Globe. October 16, 1988, p. 106.

Chicago Tribune. October 26, 1988, V, p. 3.

Interview. XVIII, December, 1988, p. 199.

Kirkus Reviews. LVI, August 1, 1988, p. 1141.

Library Journal. CXIII, October 1, 1988, p. 84.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. November 6, 1988, p. 10.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIII, October 16, 1988, p. 7.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIV, November 11, 1988, p. 38.

USA Today. November 9, 1988, p. D8.

Vogue. CLXXVIII, October, 1988, p. 294.