Anna Freud: A Biography

Drawing on a trove of Anna Freud's poems, letters, dreams and short storiesnever before made available to researchersthis sympathetic, authorized biography offers a rigorous psychoanalytic understanding of the internal conflicts that scarred Sigmund Freud's youngest child, who was keeper of the flame after his death. Anna Freud, we're shown, over-identified with males and had trouble admitting she needed maternal affection. Besides her mother, her primary caretakers were her aunt, Minna Bernays, and a nursemaid, Josefine Cihlary. She compensated for her troubled relations with these figures through a platonic female companion. According to Wesleyan professor Young-Bruehl ( Hannah Arendt ), Freud's devoted daughter-nurse ``Annerl'' remained a virgin, believing that an escape from femininity was the price of her success. The author provides intriguing glimpses of Ernest Jones's aggressive courting of Anna, her close encounter with the Gestapo, her work in England running a psychiatric nursery and her imbroglio with Jeffrey Masson when he edited the Freud/Fliess correspondence. Photos. Psychology Today Book Club alternate. (October)