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Synopsis
This edition of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's definitive biography of pioneering child analyst Anna Freud includes—among other new features—a major retrospective introduction by the author.
Praise for the Second Edition:
“Young-Bruehl’s description of one of the most complex but brilliant lights in psychoanalytic history has stood as a beacon to students of psychoanalytic history. It is the best most carefully crafted biography of any psychoanalyst and it illuminates the entire tradition with a clarity that only the exploration of the life of the daughter of the founder of the movement could possibly provide. It is a beautifully written insightful and remarkably edifying piece of work. The best has just got better.”-- Peter Fonagy, Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis, University College London
Praise for the First Edition:
“A gem of biographical writing. . . .”—Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune
“Lucid, erudite, briskly authoritative, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl . . . has given us the insight into character that makes biography an art.”—James Atlas
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl is a faculty member at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and a practicing psychoanalyst in Manhattan. She lives in New York and Toronto.
Publishers Weekly
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)