Talk:Anna Freud

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Supporting Citation

I edited out this statement, which was flagged, "Freud is said to refer to her in his diaries more than others in the family. [citation needed]". If anyone can find a trustworthy source to affirm this, that'd be great!

Kaity Sherksnas (talk) 17:16, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Letter

I love her quotes!

Look, there is another one, quotation from a letter, very beautiful, too:

"Dear John ..., You asked me what I consider essential personal qualities in a future psychoanalyst. The answer is comparatively simple. If you want to be a real psychoanalyst you have to have a great love of the truth, scientific truth as well as personal truth, and you have to place this appreciation of truth higher than any discomfort at meeting unpleasant facts, whether they belong to the world outside or to your own inner person.

Further, I think that a psychoanalyst should have...interests...beyond the limits of the medical field...in facts that belong to sociology, religion, literature, ,[and] history,...[otherwise]his outlook on...his patient will remain too narrow. This point contains...the necessary preparations beyond the requirements made on candidates of psychoanalysis in the institutes. You ought to be a great reader and become aquainted with the literature of many countries and cultures. In the great literary figures you will find people who know at least as much of human nature as the psychiatrists and psychologists try to do.

Does that answer your question?

Yours sincerely, Anna Freud

Austerlitz 88.72.3.87 15:38, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

• Source for that quotation from a letter written by Anna Freud is: The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis And Bulletin of the International Psycho-Analytical Association, Volume 49 1968, Article of Heinz Kohut HEINZ KOHUT: The evaluation of applicants for psychoanalytic training Pages 548-554 [P. S.552, 553] Austerlitz 88.72.2.238 07:10, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Quotations referring to Anna Freud, taken from the book Final Analysis

written by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Nazism and psychoanalysis

From a discussion with Sigmund Freud’s daughter:

“Terri is Jewish, she survived the Warsaw Ghetto, and I am also Jewish, and both of us have been immersed in holocaust literature. We are puzzled why so little has been written about the holocaust in psychoanalysis”. “I am puzzled by your puzzlement”, she replied immediately. “Why should psychoanalysts in particular write about the war?” “Because so many Jewish analysts are refugees from Nazism”. “But that has nothing to do with psychoanalysis”. “But doesn’t trauma play a central role in analytic theory?” Anna Freud shrugged her shoulders, apparently dismissing my concerns as uninteresting. I was deeply disappointed. Anna Freud was Jewish [...]. I tried again. “I know that your father never wrote anything about the Nazis, but he must have talked to you about it. What did he say?” She simply shrugged her shoulders, and sat silently. I could not tell if she meant that he had told her nothing, or if she did not intend to tell me anything (pages 154f).

Talking with Anna Freud

About motivation

While working at Anna Freud's house, I found an unpublished letter in which he [Freud] told Fliess, less than two weeks after he gave the paper [The Aetiology of Hysteria], "I am as isolated as you could wish me to be: the word has been given out to abandon me, and a void is forming around me." Both the immediate response to the paper, and the subsequent response were ones that Freud had not anticipated: his colleagues thought he was crazy to believe his women patients. This was bound to have a disastrous impact on a young physician with a growing family, eager to open a neurological/psychiatric clinical practice. Where were his referrals to come from, if his colleagues thought he was completely daft? I made this point to Anna Freud. "Do you believe", I said, "that this could have had anything to do with his later abandonment of the theory?" "No." She was adamant. "But tell me, Miss Freud, why did you omit this passage from your published edition of the letters?" "Because it makes my father sound so paranoid," was her response. "But if it was the truth, then he was not paranoid, he was simply perceptive." (pages 175, 176)

Help

I wanted to put the quotation of Anna Freud's letter on the mainpage and I succeeded doing so. But I also wanted to create a footnote with the source of this quotation and I didn't succeed. Even worse the rest of the page has been deleted. Can somebody please help correcting this?

Austerlitz 88.72.29.246 18:24, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

I managed to get the rest of the page back, but with the footnote it still does not work.

Austerlitz 88.72.13.86 15:37, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

It is still not like usual on wikipedia, this footnote.

Austerlitz 88.72.13.86 18:22, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

I think I've been able to fix the references technically (per WP:CITE) although I'm not convinced that the full text of the letter belongs in the article. -Fadookie ^Talk 02:56, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Kilburn

Somebody had put the family name (?) Kilburn to John, I deleted it. Please tell whether you know the name and where from.

Austerlitz 88.72.11.58 16:58, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

Anna Freud Centre

Some information:

• Homepage
• History, from the Homepage

Austerlitz 88.72.31.243 10:20, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Anna Freud and I

Chapter Eight of Masson's book Final Analysis is very interesting information, it's entitled Anna Freud and I. Austerlitz 88.72.24.0 14:02, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Should also add, Anna Freud was a lifelong virgin. Her battles with Reich. Her obsession with conforming with society. Finally, the fact of the suicide and alcohol abuse deaths of her charges.

Agreed... I have just finished watching Part II of the BBC Documentary "Century of the Self." In it, Anna Freud is painted as enormously influential on a national scale in Washington DC and Hollywood, in the era of the Cold War. There was a deliberate architecture of psychology, starting with the National Mental health Act of 1946 signed by Pres. Truman, used to train a generation to conform to society, in the theory that this would strengthen the ego in the inner battle to control irrational and dangerous subconcious forces. This theory was used extensively and changed the character of american society for many years. It was only in the 1960's, with several specific events, that this architecture was seriously questioned, and then collapsed. Anna Freud was and her adherents were central to this entire construct. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 66.92.13.78 (talk)

So? Zezen (talk) 08:40, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Extensive editing needed

The article is currently in very poor condition, and needs extensive editing... someone, please? 85.64.24.65 (talk) 15:51, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Vandalism

Someone wrote "What a twat!" Is there anyone who can remove that because I can't? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.209.19.224 (talk) 08:01, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

I can't seem to find that text anywhere in the article, which part are you talking about? Also anyone can edit an article by pressing the "Edit" tab, near the top of your screen. Cheers, and welcome to wikipedia, Spitfire^Tally-ho! 08:05, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Looks like someone removed it then.--62.209.19.224 (talk) 12:10, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Lesbian?

Were she and Dorothy Burlingham a lesbian couple? Nietzsche 2 (talk) 04:44, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

I really think, if someone says 'to their dying day' that they're not a lesbian, then they probably are not. In those days plenty of women, lived with other women but weren't gay, they just preferred female company, or never found 'the one'. I think that sentence should be removed. Unless there is glaring evidence that Anna was gay, leave that sentence OUT. I'm sure if she was alive today, you'd be done for libel:)

Veryscarymary (talk) 19:06, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

I have removed the text, it is clearly POV. Mr. D. E. Mophon (talk) 09:54, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

According to the account in the article sourced to substantive works by Roudinesco and her principal biographer Young-Breuhl there is no reason to dispute Anna Freud’s claim that she was not in a sexual relationship with Dorothy Burlingham. On this basis and given the consensus here I have reverted repeated edits by Totocugno which continue to describe her as a lesbian citing unreliable sources from France (describing her as a self-hating homophobic homosexual) which have not been deemed noteworthy enough to merit translation into English. Almanacer (talk) 19:12, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

Most people would want to be guided by an official biography like Young-Bruehl (2008). She deals with the matter on page 138. 86.187.225.105 (talk) 16:03, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

i cite reliable sources ! --T0t0 Cugn0 (talk) 23:58, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Talking about main sources to allow oneself to refuse sources because of their nationality is neither neutral nor encyclopedic! There are academicworks in English presenting the same perspectives (describing her as a lesbian ""self-hating homophobic homosexual"" etc), what reasons will you find for refusing them ? --T0t0 Cugn0 (talk) 13:36, 8 July 2023 (UTC)