ABSTRACT
Arguments about ways of understanding clinical material and other observations and the construction of explanatory theories are part of the life-blood of psychoanalysis as of any science. Such arguments help to move knowledge forward when the debate is constructive, and sometimes, though more slowly, even when it is not. Anna Freud was involved in many such debates. There are two areas which I particularly wish to consider here. The first is the so-called ‘Controversial discussions’ conducted in the British Psychoanalytic Society during the early 1940s, familiar to all British analysts as well as to many in other countries. These had been preceded in 1927 by a symposium in London criticising Anna Freud’s book on child analysis (Peters 1985, pp. 94-97).
