ABSTRACT
Anna Freud was, first and foremost, a psychoanalyst – and a psychoanalyst, moreover, who was committed to promoting and preserving the fundamental ideas passed down by her father, Sigmund Freud. During his lifetime she cared for him directly, throughout his long illness, and as he became increasingly frail she took on the role of his spokesperson in the psychoanalytic community – reading his papers at meetings when he was too ill to attend himself, and trying to represent his views in the political debates within the IPA (Limentani, 1983). After his death, Anna Freud was in many respects the ‘dutiful daughter’ – described half-mockingly by Jacques Lacan (1988: 63) as the ‘plumb line of psychoanalysis’ – connecting all post-Freudian developments back to their roots in her father’s work. She played a major role in editing Freud’s work and supervising the publication of his correspondence, and she was closely involved with Ernest Jones’s official biography of Sigmund Freud, published in the 1950s (Jones, 1953–57). One of her last major works was a long ‘Study Guide to Freud’s Writing’ (1978a), and in the last years of her life Anna Freud continued to see herself as ‘the ambassador and representative’ of her father’s life and work (Grubrich-Simitis, 1983: 43). She was, as W. Ernest Freud put it at a memorial service for Anna Freud, ‘the dutiful daughter, following in the spirit of her father, devoted, enthusiastic, indomitable’ (W. E. Freud, 1983: 8).
