Warning: Suicide Themes
Anna Freud
Anna Freud was the sixth child of Sigmund and Martha in 8 years, born December 3, 1895. It was a time of cultural excitement for Vienna. It was in a multi-ethnic empire with technological advancements like electric street lighting and the beginning of the tram. The Viennese coffeehouses were patroned by artists, writers, and philosophers, and of course, Vienna was considered the city of music. Sigmund treated Anna as a good omen because his faltering practice at the time recovered well in the first year of her life. This was definitely a unique family she was born into. Freud once remarked that Martha’s sister Minna Bernays and himself were the wild ones and that Martha and Ignaz Schoenberg were opposites. “That’s why we get on better in a crisscross arrangement; why two similar people like Minna and myself don’t suit each other specially; why the two good-natured ones don’t attract each other.” He preferred “someone delicate whom I could take care of.” At the time Martha was considered an efficient and punctual master of domesticity. She was happy to leave the intellectual excitement and brouhaha for the people coming and going and instead she focused more on the marriage. Anna Freud as an adult recalled that “my mother believed in my father, not in psychoanalysis.” Anna also described her grandmother as despotic, and Ernest Jones confirmed the same that Martha couldn’t assert herself against her mother.
Minna Bernays was much more interested in Sigmund’s theories and liked to travel with him to Austrian spas and to Italy. She eventually became a personal secretary for Sigmund, which the role eventually fell to his three daughters in turn. Minna was also more opinionated and forceful like her mother. Despite Minna’s similarity with her mother, she and most of the rest of the family moved away from the matriarch’s Orthodox Judaism. Both Martha and Minna helped in the Freud household as partners, and the youngest children, including Ernst and Sophie Freud, were helped by a Catholic nursemaid, or Kinderfrau, Josefine Cihlarz. A governess also helped with raising the older siblings, Mathilde, Martin, and Oliver.
Josefine used to go on promenades with the family that were mostly peaceful, except for the odd demonstrations against Franz Josef’s government. “On one of these occasions our little detachment, commanded by Josefine, found itself between the rioters and [the Imperial] dragoons. It narrowly escaped being trampled down, perambulator and all, under the hooves of the cavalry.” Josefine was deemed a rescuer of the children when they got in trouble. Anna was told later of a story about a watchmaker living in an apartment below the Freuds who had a small gas explosion, and Josefine came to Anna first, to see how she was doing. The family felt that Anna was Josefine’s favorite, and typical of nursemaids, they often bond with children like surrogate mothers. Those children eventually get used to looking to their nursemaids first for help, even when their mothers are nearby. This made an impression on Anna and she later wrote, when she became a child analyst, about how that lost link with parents leads to a feeling of actually physically being lost. “It is only when parental feelings are ineffective or too ambivalent, or when aggression is more effective than their love, or when the mother’s emotions are temporarily engaged elsewhere that the children not only feel lost but, in fact, get lost.” Anna described Josefine’s warm empathy that extended to children and animals. For example, when an upset dog was howling in the neighborhood, it would irritate the Freuds but Josefine would just say “he can’t help it, he’s a dog.”
Despite Josefine’s dedication to the children, Martin recalled her being ultra-conservative about social environments. She always sided with police when there was a protest and she found certain neighborhoods and restaurants to be only for “poor people, destitute and without decent pride…” Josefine stayed with the family until Anna finished her first year at school. She got married and had children of her own. When Anna was twenty-nine she attended Josefine’s funeral. She said that Josefine was “the oldest relation and the most genuine of my childhood.” In Adam Phillips’ On Flirtation, he described Anna as one that “throughout her adult life [she] would seek intimate relationships with powerful older women and would have remarkably little to say in her theoretical work about mother-daughter relationships.”
When growing up, Anna was considered by her parents as the last one and abstinence was their method of contraception afterwards. Sigmund gave time to his children more in the summers, and in the professional year more to his work. All the children remembered fondly the summer vacations, and Anna especially loved them, because she always felt left out as the youngest child most of the time. These are the years when you’re too young to do anything interesting that the older siblings can do. Also because a lot of the raising of children were given to housemaids and governesses, they had to be well enough behaved, for example to join Sigmund’s forest walks, because he wasn’t expected to do that kind of work, which most parents today would regard as a regular duty to discipline children directly so they can handle different environments.
Toilet training back then was also inflexible in terms of who was responsible for it. “One can say, that the whole second year of life proceeds under the impact of these frequently very energetic efforts on the part of the adults to inculcate cleanliness…The child’s efforts to come to terms with the offending part within himself then lead[s] to the precocious employment of defenses such as repression, reaction formation, and turning aggression against the self. Following this, there appear such manifestations as disgust with dirty hands, excessive tendencies toward orderliness, and repetitive behavior.” For Anna, this would include conflicts with her mother figures during this time, since as Martin said “toilet training was the domain of womenfolk.”
In the early years of parenting, Freud was more distant but would make some observations. In one letter he told his colleague Wilhelm Fliess “recently Anna complained that Mathilde had eaten all the apples and demanded that [Mathilde’s] belly be slit open (as happened to the wolf in the fairy tale of the little goat). She is turning into a charming child.” Her character developed into an adventurous, fearless one that was also prim and orderly. Her adventurousness came from the feeling of missing out on those family vacations, especially Freud’s trip to Athens where he sent home a beloved postcard to her. When she was older, she relished her time on those trips, including with her brothers.
Martin gave brotherly care to Anna, taught her how to swim and took her for hikes. She also became close with her brother Ernst who was an independent type and who eventually became an architect. Oliver was the engineering type and the other children would treat him as the go-to-guy for technical questions. On the other hand, Mathilde was the sister of reasonableness and good nature. Sophie was more girlish and charming. Sigmund loved Anna’s cheek, naughtiness, and her saucy adventurous side. Anna early on was interested in Sigmund’s antiquities, and loved to tell tales and she eventually started to write. Martin had more aspirations of being a great poet and writer which led to disappointment and a resentment for being overshadowed by his father. Mathilde unfortunately went through an experimental surgery that failed horribly leading almost to her death. She recuperated but wasn’t able to have children. Sophie and Anna had a sibling rivalry that extended into adolescence. Sophie was part of the family knitting circle headed by Aunt Minna. Anna was taught by Josefine, but her work was criticized by Sophie, and Anna was jealous of Sophie’s good looks. She was even jealous of the beauty of Sophie’s name compared to plain boring palindrome, Anna. Both sisters also competed for their tutor’s schedule.
As Anna got older she still continued knitting and weaving, but she also filled her boredom with reading and writing. She also developed a good memory for literary references, while her literary taste steered away from the totally implausible. “She preferred adventuring in the American wild West with the German yarn spinner Karl May or in India with Rudyard Kipling. She enjoyed poems about heroes and deeds of valor. When Anna was around fourteen, Sigmund gave her a little more of a taste for reality. “You see those houses with their lovely façades? Things are not necessarily so lovely behind the façades. And so it is with human beings too.” Anna liked to sit on a library ladder in the corner of the room and listen to her father talk to colleagues about their presentations. She again was greatly disappointed by not being able to see the lectures and she was refused the transatlantic trip to America, with passengers Jung, Ferenczi, Jones, and Brill.
When Anna finished her final degree at the Lyceum, she faced with the question of what she would do with the rest of her life. Sophie married Max Halberstadt, and Anna went on an Italian tour. The strange letters between Freud and his daughter displayed a worry about her upbringing. Freud kept Anna in Italy away from her rival Sophie’s marriage. In a letter to her he wondered if she was jealous, less about Sophie, but instead of Max. She replied “naturally, I think rather often about Sophie’s wedding, but I am indifferent about Max, because he is a complete stranger to me; I don’t really like him, but I’m certainly not jealous of him. It is really not nice to say it, but I’m glad that Sophie is getting married, because the unending quarrel between us was horrible for me.” The sordid story underneath was Freud’s worry that female clitoridal masturbation and the content of daydreams, could veer a woman away from femininity, “a piece of masculine sexuality,” which wasn’t studied as much as male masturbation was. This dovetails Helene Deutsch’s desire that women experience vaginal pleasure so they can truly be feminine. Freud was hoping her Italian sojourn would influence her to in fact be more feminine. Anna responded that “…I truly do not know why I am sometimes quite well and sometimes not, and I would like very much to know, so that I can do something to help myself. I would like very much to be reasonable like Mathilde, and I don’t know why with me everything takes so long…I do not want to have it again, for I want to be a reasonable person or at least to become one, but I can’t always help myself [when] alone.”
Object Relations: Helene Deutsch Pt. 1: https://rumble.com/v2wrvg5-object-relations-helene-deutsch-pt.-1.html
Object Relations: Helene Deutsch Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v2yepky-object-relations-helene-deutsch-pt.-2.html
Freud responded with an attitude that Anna was running away from “many things of which a grown-up girl would not be afraid. We will notice a change when you no longer withdraw from the pleasures of your age but gladly enjoy what other girls enjoy.” He thought she was too overzealous and sensitive and too removed from her life and nature. At that early date, Freud thought that masturbation and fantasies could be different at different ages and that it could steer one off the path of normal sexual development. In these days, those who were not religious, were still Darwinian, which is all about survival, mating and procreation, on top of the fact that parents always wish to live long enough see grandchildren.
As Anna moved to complete her examinations, that would allow her to begin a teaching apprenticeship, she wanted to reward herself with a trip to England to meet extended family in Manchester, and the beginnings of WWI were already underway with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and Duchess Sophie of Hohenberg. All three of Anna’s brothers would soon be enlisted. Anna was already enmeshed in the analytical world when she was being courted by Ernest Jones, which Sigmund was dead set against, because he felt that Anna was too young and not interested in men yet. Freud also felt Anna was closer to the family as the youngest so he was more protective and wanted to make sure she learned more about people and the world before hastily getting married. Ernest Jones at the time was recently rebuffed by a patient of Freud’s, Loe Kann, who after dropping an addiction to morphine during analysis, married a different “Jones,” Herbert (Davy). Ernest brought flowers, took Anna to his favorite places in his beloved England, and took extra attention to correct Anna’s English. Freud saw that Ernest was too old and needed a more experienced and independent woman rather than a refined young one. Anna also felt strongly that the love from Ernest was more unconsciously about Freud and that she was just a doorway to that professional connection, which was how she felt often around her father’s acolytes. In England there were some bright points for Anna in that she didn’t find the typical anti-Semitism she found in Vienna. On her boat trip back to the continent, she wrote about the calm of the sea compared to the tensions of the Great War.
As Anna developed her skills and became a certified teacher, her superiors and administrators noted her passion, conscientious preparations, and her apparent gift for teaching. Sigmund also praised his daughter for her “fiery zeal.” She also learned at the time a lot of administrative tasks from her secretary and assistant duties, which became transferrable skills for her later administrative jobs. Because she was young and not too tall, she also appeared to the students as more relatable, approachable and not as intimidating as other authority figures at the school. This didn’t mean that her classes were undisciplined though. She had great control of the classroom where “she only had to look at [the students] firmly and seriously to keep [them] in order.”
During war time rationing, the children boasted less about their parent’s status, with their family romance fantasies, but instead exaggerated and obsessed about food quality and what one was able to obtain in one’s family. “My father always eats meat every Sunday.” During food shortages one student gave Anna a cube of marmalade wrapped in paper under the Christmas tree. “I was in love with my teacher, and this was before the name of Freud meant anything to me.”
As Anna was finding her own in teaching, Sigmund was becoming lonely as many of his colleagues were enlisting and the international psychoanalytical meetings couldn’t continue. At this time Anna was moving around Vienna, Ischl, Gastein, Karlsbad, or Hallstadt. Anna helped her father with translations of psychoanalytic work, but quickly their letters were starting to turn into analysis sessions about her dreams. In a lot of Anna’s dreams, she typically identified with male characters. Both her poetry and dreams were revealing a feeling of falseness and a desire to be more authentic and decisive. She found that a lot of her “nice stories” she daydreamed about were taken in by parents and society to cover overtop her dark side: Her unconscious. A lot of this stifling that came with growing up Anna felt originated in parental overprotectiveness.
In fact, in Psychoanalysis for Teachers and Parents, Anna described her inner struggle against her parenting, and what all children go through, which was wanting to recover what was lost in socialization. “…The originality of the child, together with a great deal of his energy and talents, are sacrificed to being ‘good’…It is as if the parents said: You can certainly go away, but you must take us with you.” In her poem Encouragement, Anna espoused a beginning of a kind of ego psychology where one wants to see things for oneself outside of authoritative advise, and away from the endless searching for a perfect pattern to be emulated. She wanted less of the inner war between the Ego and Super-ego.
Yes, by strange hands, and unasked
You will be set down in strange rooms,
Where you can turn your steps forward,
Backward, any way, and as you like.
Don’t be foolish and ask the path
When you see others going aimlessly.
Try yourself! All those standers-by—
Not one can tell you what is right.
And you should find things your way,
Testing them with your own hands.
What’s on the surface, what you see,
Gives false notice of realities.
Maybe you will have to wander
Many paths, in the cold and dark.
But who promised you that only
For joy were you brought to this earth?
Don’t look too much—I counsel you—
At how your wishes get fulfilled.
And if some longings go unmet, don’t
Be astonished. We call that Life.
Anna’s own dreams mirrored a sadness in taking up arms and sacrificing love in order to be a hero. There’s a sinfulness in her that had to be disguised by “nice stories,” but as her analysis with Freud went on there was an uneasy truce between the light and the dark.
At the end of the war, the three brothers returned, but so many family members were sick. Martha Freud had pneumonia, and Minna was suffering from pleurisy. Freud lost his friend and benefactor von Freund who was fighting despair caused by his terminal cancer, and was hoping for relief by undergoing psychoanalysis. The biggest blow to the family was when Sophie died from the flu epidemic. Martha in particular was most devastated because of all the effort she put into keeping Sophie’s marriage a happy one during the war. Anna poured herself into work to deal with her grief while she was recovering from tuberculosis. At this time her bond with Sigmund increased and she was determined to practice psychoanalysis. She also helped Sophie’s husband and his sister-in-law with the surviving children.
During this time, Anna wrote existential prose about time, fate, and circumstance. She compared the loss of Sophie like that of some cleared trees in a forest. Her anal ideas turned into intestinal darkness with a protagonist blindly trudging along through an earthy time. Ego is always contending with time and circumstance in her work. “We are imprisoned in the realm of life, like a sailor on his tiny boat, on an infinite ocean. Around us is the boundless expanse, which lures us on. But we have nothing except a pair of oars, impotent as wings of a mosquito, and our aching hands.” Time took an importance for her that was greater than treasure. “I don’t stop scooping up time, as I lean over its stream. And in the glistening play of drops that the waves splash on my face, I forget about the booty I set out to bring home.”
The losses continued with suicides around her with friends and acquaintances. These involved women who couldn’t find happiness in their relationships or circumstances. One friend Mausi, left a cryptic note before leaving for Vienna, advising “do become really happy, Annerl, don’t let this get to you—and you’ll now have an easier time being with the boys.” She was pregnant and unhappy with the marriage in a way that wasn’t revealed. She poisoned herself in the end. The note may have referred to having confidence with men and being able to communicate what a woman’s happiness is to them. Anna was disappointed that she wasn’t able to help sooner. “Now I know what I should have said to her concerning the ‘other’ boys in order to give her confidence, but it is too late.” Again, Anna was pained by the existential plight of the ego in a world of uncertainty. “So I realize how great is the difference between what I would like to be and how I really am.”
Anna’s way “with the boys” was to learn from them as opposed to marry them. There were rumors that she was in love with Siegfried Bernfeld, who was known in the community for creating a project for Viennese Jewish war orphans and street children. He was also an active Zionist and socialist organizer. Anna instead was much more interested in his projects to help children. His method was a mixture of Montessori methods, socialist trade apprenticeships, Stanley Hall’s work on adolescents, and some of Freud’s work as well. His hope was the education for these children would prepare them for eventual emigration to Palestine. Because his methods were considered too progressive to the sponsors, the project was shut down in a year. Anna regardless learned a lot from Bernfeld and also psychoanalyst Willi Hoffer. Her informal study circle included August Aichhorn who introduced her to the Vienna social services system, institutions, and welfare arrangements. Children in these arrangements included juvenile delinquents, hungry children, the undisciplined, and children with various handicaps. Sigmund Freud supported this extension into child psychology, and this entire group, along with Melanie Klein, became theorists who believed that neurosis was more important than heredity, which bureaucratic psychiatry preferred to believe that the latter was more likely the cause of delinquency.
Behind the Façade
Like so many other analysts, Anna Freud used autobiographical information, as well as that of her patients, to develop her case studies and theories, but there were no actual process notes available of her controversial analysis with her father, so the remaining information was gleaned from her poems and the paper Beating Fantasies and Daydreams. In Anna’s paper in 1919, it continued on from her father’s A Child Is Being Beaten, where he found a repeated mental activity “in two of my four female cases the function of this superstructure was to make possible a feeling of satisfied excitation, even though the masturbatory act was abstained from.” Anna’s paper covered topics about parental punishment for masturbation and extended into dreams of punishment related to forbidden desires. A lot of adults struggle with Freud’s Oedipus Complex, where children fight for the attention of their parents, or pursue desires that are off-limits, mainly because they forget about those events as they grow up, so they strangely end up being surprised by their own reactions, despite the obvious patterns. Still, how they habitually react to prohibitions builds into their current skill level in adulthood and controls their future discourse like a hand reaching out from the past. For example, if people meditate, go into analysis, etc., there will be a release of inhibition at one point or another, often leading to outbursts of negative content mirroring those old conflictual patterns. The simple formula would be that of having a desire and some authority figure becomes an obstacle in the way, and then seeing the world through that filter. Adults feel this way about many parenting styles because many patients, when they were a child, had high expectations at one time or another and impossible wishes during their development. In other cases, the parent was overly repressive or abusive. Whether they wanted to hog the attention of a parent, or fight with siblings over objects of desire or parental attention, strong reactions are almost inevitable. Eventually the parents became boring, then the outer world was introduced as a new place to compete for objects.
Most world politics, economics in the macro, and office politics, mirror family dramas in the micro. We all imitated the same cultural examples, by daydreaming about some common form of savoring and bumping into others who had the same idea. It’s almost impossible to avoid a nemesis or an encounter with an evil doppelganger when the object of desire is very scarce and highly coveted. There are also desires that are exciting precisely because they are forbidden by authority figures, which signal to the public that the pleasure may be intense, wild, and enormously gratifying, despite having dangerous side-effects. Then if you add powerful people regularly gaming the system and getting involved in corruption, who then repress those who try to hold them accountable, there’s a feeling of unfairness that increases desire even more. Transference and neurotic projection now arise to predict behaviors of new authority figures with some accuracy, but not without painful mistakes. In the end, looking forward to a desire ends up being mixed with the anticipation of conflict. Desires become tainted and are no longer carefree. In extremes, some become ill and turn to a myriad of defenses like paranoia, psychosis, avoidance, etc.
Sexuality Pt 4: Masochism – Sigmund Freud & Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gtrq1-sexuality-pt-4-masochism-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
In her paper, Anna described general tenets of how these daydreams occurred in patients. There’s a sadomasochistic attachment that can push the desire beyond the satisfaction found in freedom of choice, to include, and daringly welcome, new conflicts and challenges. In Anna’s paper, the agent of censorship in the mind established “definite rules and regulations which determined the conditions of gaining pleasure. At that time the persons administering the beatings were invariably teachers; only later and in exceptional cases the fathers of the boys were added—as spectators mostly. But even in these detailed elaborations of the fantasy, the acting figures remained schematic, all determining characteristics such as names, individual faces, and personal history being denied to them.” Sometimes the patient was beaten, but at other times, different children were. “In this first phase, therefore, the child claimed all the love for himself and left all the punishment and castigation to the others.” Some stories had unhappy endings as above and others had peaceful reconciliations. Anna saw connections in both stories. “To [the patient] the beating fantasy represented everything that was ugly, reprehensible, and forbidden, while the nice stories were the expression of everything that brought beauty and happiness. A connection between the two simply could not exist; in fact, it was inconceivable that a figure playing a part in a nice story could even appear in the beating scene.”
Desire needs a certain amount of challenge, in the form of rules, to provide added pleasure to the object, but not so much confrontation so as to be too much of a deterrent. Anna then inferred how pleasure could be connected to pain in just this way as cultural demands heap guilt onto adolescents, gluing those forbidden pleasures to prohibitions, as a kind of catastrophizing. As punishments repeat with authority figures in society, outside of parenting and school, the attachments can finally die and be buried by “self-reproaches, pangs of conscience, and temporary depressed moods. The pleasure derived from the fantasy was more and more confined to a single pleasurable moment which seemed to be embedded in unpleasure that occurred before and after it. As the beating fantasy no longer served its function of providing pleasure, it occurred less and less frequently in the course of time.” For authority figures, this is great news, because the majority of the population will want a strong deterrent for anything criminal, but it can be excessive if victims think the culture is backward for punishing something healthy or if it’s only about corrupt institutions trying to preserve their tyranny and stockpile all the rewards of society.
In the case of the patient, her superego took over some of the punishing to reduce the frequency of beating fantasies. “The two [stories] were kept apart so carefully that each occurrence of the beating fantasy—which on occasion did break through—had to be punished by a temporary renunciation of the nice stories.” The fantasies also returned when her ego strength wasn’t enough for the quantity of craving or she was tired. “During difficult periods, i.e., at times of increased external demands or diminished internal capabilities, the nice stories no longer succeeded in fulfilling their task. And then it had frequently happened that at the conclusion and climax of a fantasied beautiful scene the pleasurable and pleasing love scene was suddenly replaced by the old beating situation together with the sexual gratification associated with it, which then led to a full discharge of the accumulated excitement. But such incidents were quickly forgotten, excluded from memory, and consequently treated as though they had never happened.”
As children grow up, they get better at elaborating different types of content in the form of stories, which is a sublimation of erotic desire, and that’s how these narratives tend to have “a plot which leads to heightened tension and ultimately to a climax.” A splitting occurs very quickly in these stories when a hero springs up and the person who is an obstacle instantly becomes the villain. In order to keep the tension going and to heighten the pleasure, the villain usually finds a way to not kill the hero right away to avoid ending the story too quickly. If you have seen enough films, both good and bad quality ones, there are sadomasochistic patterns where the villain makes a bunch of smart moves, but in the end they always make a stupid mistake at the right time when the tension peaks, to allow the hero to win, and so then satisfy the audience in release.
When you have to shoot, shoot; don’t talk – The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnFdTXtFdSE
St. Vincent Teaches Creativity and Song Writing | Official Trailer | MasterClass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toD5c_OOirY
Rupert Spira: ‘How to find lasting happiness’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9EH-Kx3fjU
Anna then connected sublimation to this, in the fact that projects, hobbies, and other endeavors can provide alternative forms of tension and release. “While the beating fantasy thus represents a return of the repressed, the nice stories on the other hand represent its sublimation. In the beating fantasy the direct sexual drives are satisfied, whereas in the nice stories the aim-inhibited drives, as Freud calls them, find gratification.” Her patient’s “nice stories” eventually appropriated the sexual pattern and altered it into a socially acceptable heroic dream, including: “antagonism between a strong and a weak person; a misdeed—mostly unintentional—on the part of the weak one which puts him at the other’s mercy; the latter’s menacing attitude which justifies the gravest apprehensions; a slowly mounting anxiety, often depicted by exquisitely appropriate means, until the tension becomes almost unendurable; and finally, as the pleasurable climax, the solution of the conflict, the pardoning of the sinner, reconciliation, and, for a moment, complete harmony between the former antagonists…The decisive difference between [the fantasy and the daydream] rests in their solution, which in the [underlying] fantasy is brought about by beating, and in the daydream by forgiveness and reconciliation.”
Sublimation – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gv2fr-sublimation-sigmund-freud.html
Anna noticed that the sublimated story facilitated affection as a substitute pleasure, whereas the fantasy wanted direct satisfaction of the sexual drives, leading to catastrophizing thoughts. Sublimation was represented by the “nice stories” for Anna as a way to be more socially acceptable for the patient with object choices, to allow successful negotiation with others, but also some concrete result had to happen for the stories to reduce frequency in her mind. “Several years after the story of the knight first emerged, the girl put it in writing. She produced an absorbing short story…The written story treats all parts of the content of the daydream as equally objective material, the selection being guided solely by regard for their suitability for representation. For the better she succeeds in the presentation of her material, the greater will be the effect on others and therefore also her own indirect pleasure gain. By renouncing her private pleasure in favor of making an impression on others, the author has accomplished an important developmental step: the transformation of an autistic into social activity. We could say: she has found the road leads from her fantasy life back to reality.”
Anna thought that a solid ego was authentic to present-moment experience, and goals should be based on real events, feedback, and emotions. It’s how to regulate emotions in the real world by creating optimum tensions for release, which included a tolerance for imperfection: the patience to live a real life as opposed to an ideal one. She included the super-ego as a necessary conscience guardrail, but she was still skeptical enough with that agency in that it could in many cases fall into pathology because of overly repressive parenting and/or cultural influences. Yet she still liked some of the functions of the super-ego, for example, to be able to groom herself well and to be neat and clean, the anal side of her personality, but she desired to have no division in her psyche, “only one will.” If there are multiple agencies in the mind, they must all work together. Despite her insights, Anna was struggling to get the conscience and the authentic side of herself to cooperate. Her dreams were often conflicted and violent with catastrophizing. “I murdered somebody, or something like that. As punishment, I was put into a large room where there were many people, who could do with me as they pleased. The people wanted to tear me to bits and throw me out the window…”
The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html
Certainly, with Anna Freud’s situation, there were lots of theories about her sexuality. Many of the poems had a desire for the protagonist to be free and authentic, but at the same time they were suffering devastating repression. In one of her dreams she took up a sword at one path in a junction as a symbol of personal sacrifice. “A young hero meets two figures at a forest crossroads. One is Love, the other Glory. Love offered a rose, and Glory a sword for bringing death upon enemies. Before the hero can make up his mind. Love places the rose ‘in the golden hair of another.’ The hero then takes the sword from Glory and goes off with it—but not in a triumphant frame of mind:
Wearily I took the sword in my hand.
And unwillingly I went off to battle.
Soon the sword’s sharp edge turned
My happiness into bitter sorrow…
For all the glory my sword has won,
The old and the young do envy me.
But my heart still hungers after Love,
Which in the forest there I sacrificed.
“The poem finds the glory of sword-wielding unsatisfactory, loveless. The hero is like Cyrano de Bergerac [who] goes off to war without speaking his love for Roxane, and love passes him by—until it is too late. There is no redemption in Anna Freud’s poem. But also no illusion.” Another Freudian acolyte, Lou Andreas-Salomé was an influence on Anna’s desire for authenticity. Lou “told the young Anna Freud that the only ‘sin’ was to be untrue to one’s own nature. To live it was for her to fulfill her unique destiny and hence to represent truly that aspect of the universe of nature which had its being in her. The ideal of self-realization can of course be a philosophical mask for undisclosed conflicts like any other ideal. It is certainly true that the course of Lou Salome’s life was one of ceaseless determination to be true to her image of herself and to reject all influences that might have limited her.” She also became like a training analyst helping Anna develop her theoretical knowledge. “The childless Frau Lou had entered into a line of succession to Anna Freud’s good mother, the adoring Kinderfrau, Josefine…” She helped Anna with her confidence in public speaking and theorizing, which may be what Anna was referring to when she wanted to help her friend Mausi. Lou was aware of Anna’s dedication to her father and didn’t criticize her for extending her stay in the nest. At the time she associated Anna’s rebuffs of male attention to “asceticism.” Sigmund was ambivalent and desired that Anna stay at home, but he also wanted her to start her own family. “I’m glad to see Anna blooming and in good spirits, and I only wish she would soon find some reason to exchange her attachment to her old father for some more lasting one.” Anna was also wondering about her own situation. She analytically felt “the absence of the third person, the one onto whom transference advances, and with whom one acts out and finishes off the conflicts.” If one wanted to read more into Anna’s desire for Sophie’s attention and affection, the “sacrifice in the forest” in the above poem, and the image of Sophie’s death as being a clearing in a forest, those could be tied together. Sophie represented the femininity that Anna couldn’t achieve, so then one must have if one cannot be. Again, this does not have to be overt sexuality, but a desire for affection. Psychoanalysis is meant to have layers and nuances to love that can escalate, deescalate, and splinter off into replacements of different kinds of love, including filial, platonic, as well as romantic love.
Lou Andreas-Salomé Pt. 9: https://rumble.com/v5uq6vh-lou-andreas-salom-pt.-9.html
The resolution of the Oedipus Complex can also go in different directions towards masculine and feminine directions, or in sublimation towards work, or some mixture thereof. Freud wasn’t altogether sure, but he felt at the time it was possible that all perversions were more apparent to most people in the ages after the resolution of the Oedipus Complex, as opposed to before. With the “to be, or to have” conundrum, the reason to be or to have seems to have an effect as the unconscious looks for replacements. If one wants to imitate the famous intellectual successful father to capture the affection of women exclusively, that leads to a lesbian orientation when it becomes overt. But what if the woman wants to be the father solely because of his vocation? Can one marry one’s own work? Concurrently, identity can also work through expanded boundaries to demand personal preferences from the role model, because one’s own self-esteem is now attached to their fortunes. “[Freud] knew the extent of [Anna’s] idealization of him, and revealed it—sometimes in jest and sometimes somberly—in his letters.” For example, in 1919 when Freud had to borrow money from Max Eitington, he noticed “[his daughter’s] feeling that her father should not need money from his friends…” Anna wanted the attention that her father received, but maybe not the attention her mother enjoyed. This can be to receive acclaim from those who give acclaim to the role model, for example here, to desire the profession of the father because motherhood is not as desirable, or some mixture there of. In the typical Oedipus complex for girls, where they want the father’s attention, the disgust of the incest barrier moves them to find masculine surrogates. In Anna’s case, because the mother as an incestuous object is also disgusting, once the position of the father is superseded by daughter in actuality, then mother surrogates can be available for partnerships, whether friendly, or overtly romantic. By completing her paper, which included a patient who ironically got satisfaction by writing down her own “nice story,” surely Anna received pleasure from publishing as well, even if there was a lingering emptiness.
In summary, “Freud noted the ‘masculinity complex’ in these two cases, [Sigmund’s and Anna’s], and concluded that ‘when they turn away from their incestuous love for their father, with its genital significance, they easily abandon their feminine role.’ Freud did not connect the female patients’ assumption of a masculine role in the fantasies and daydreams with masculinized behavior or homosexuality. On the contrary, he saw it as an escape from sexuality: ‘the girl escapes from the demands of the erotic side of her life altogether. She turns herself in fantasy into a man, without herself becoming active in a masculine way, and is no longer anything but a spectator at the event which has the place of a sexual act.’ This much was also implied in Anna Freud’s paper, but she went on to show that the spectator who communicates, who writes down what she understands, enjoys a form of pleasure—not masturbatory pleasure, not sexual pleasure, but the social pleasure of praise…[Her analysis] allowed her to transform fantasy activity and daydreaming into the social activity of writing. Anna Freud’s paper is both a study of sublimation and an act of sublimation…” It’s also a story of how people can use their daydreaming to control their cravings with practice and direct their motivations to a chosen target despite social pressure to the contrary.
Anna Freud: A Biography – Elisabeth Young-Bruehl: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780300140231/
The Writings of Anna Freud Vol. 1: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780823668700/
The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol 17 – by Sigmund Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780099426721/
The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas-Salomé – Stanley A. Leavy: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780465095063/
On Flirtation – Adam Phillips: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780674634404/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/