Rejection
Like many other psychoanalysts, Anna Freud disparaged certain types of mothers and the kind of pathological parenting that could undermine childhood foundations. Many mothers, of course don’t want to hear critiques, especially when they are already burnt out. The reality is that many parents have their own psychological problems and wounds that have not been healed, so parenting has never been uniform. The mother is considered the foundation for ALL loving relationships to go from self-centered to being able to love others. If certain groundwork is not completed in early infancy, Anna felt that permanent damage would be inflicted. “It was demonstrated that all advantages of a later family life may be wasted on a child who has lacked a warm and satisfying mother relationship in the first instance. In this earliest partnership in an individual’s life, that of infant and mother, the demands are all on one side (the infant’s), while the obligations are all on the other side (the mother’s). It is the mother’s task to be attentive to the child’s needs (for food, sleep, warmth, movement, comfort, company), not to misunderstand them, or to confuse them with each other, and to fulfill them, not according to her own speed and rhythm, but by adapting her actions to the child’s. The infant is dependent on the mother for his satisfactions. If she proves a gratifying and accommodating provider for his pressing needs, he begins to love, not only his experiences of wish fulfillment, but her person. Thereby the infant’s original state of self-centeredness is changed into an attitude of emotional interest in his environment and he becomes capable of loving, first the mother and—after her—the father and other important figures in his external world…When the mother welcomes the child’s first outflow of feeling toward her and responds to it, she favors his progress from self-centeredness to object love. When she fails in her task at some point and thereby rejects his advances, she may destroy an all-important potentiality in her infant, with disastrous consequences for his future healthy development.”
Where mothers may have a point is when children have constitutional problems that are unrelated to parenting. Analysts jumping the gun blamed mothers wrongly for what they couldn’t control. Like with heated sexual orientation debates, conditioning and biology co-mingle and make everything more complicated. “Analysts have been too emphatic when children had severe biological disturbances unrelated to loving-care and took those examples of mothers to be ‘cold, not outgoing, unresponsive, unloving, hating,’ in short, ‘rejecting’ their children. This caused much heart-searching and also much self-accusation, especially among the mothers of abnormal children…There is, of course, no lack of evidence for the occurrence of rejection of infants. Many infants, instead of being kept as near to the mother as possible, spend many hours of the day in isolation; many are subjected to traumatic separations from their mothers; many, at the end of infancy, have good reason to feel deserted when another child is born; many are, indeed, unwanted. Nevertheless, there is behind these happenings a variety of determinants which decides their outcome. There is not one type of rejecting mother, there are many. There are those who are responsible for their rejecting attitude, who can be exhorted, advised, and helped toward a better adjustment to their child; there are also those with whom rejecting is beyond their control…Children are deprived of the company and care of their mothers for external, physical reasons, and for internal, mental ones; or both factors are inextricably intermixed in other cases. Also, no child is wholly loved. The idea of ‘rejection’ in its present form is unprecise, vague, and through overuse has become almost meaningless. Nothing short of definition and classification of the degrees and types of withdrawal of mother love from the infant can restore it to its initial usefulness. Hence the present inquiry into the concept of the rejecting mother.”
Many mothers do want to be involved in their child’s lives more but they are dealing with the “…financial difficulties, [the] lack of their own home, or of space, the burden of too many other children, [the] illegitimacy of the relations with the child’s father…Such separations may be the mother’s fault (when she leaves the child in the care of strangers for trivial reasons such as trips, visits), but they need not be. The mother may be ill, have to go to the hospital, undergo an operation, need convalescence. The illness of an older child or the needs of the father may remove her from the infant. External conditions may interfere, as they did in wartime. The mother may die and leave her child an orphan.” If the mother has internal reasons they may involve the “lack of affection for the husband, which is extended to his child. Or the reasons, rationalized merely on the surface by external conditions, may lie much deeper in the mother’s nature. There are many women who are incapacitated for motherhood by virtue of their masculinity. They may wish for children for reasons of pride and possessiveness, but their humiliation at finding themselves female, their longing for a career, their competition with the husband preclude any real enjoyment of or with the infant…There are, further, the mothers who waver between rejection and acceptance of the mother role. During her pregnancy a woman may be wholly unwilling and then be seduced and tempted by the infant himself until she enters into an affectionate relationship; in such cases the living presence of the child arouses in her what one used to call the ‘mother instinct.’ Or there may be conflict between internal and external pressure. This is well known from casework with unmarried mothers who reject their infants for social considerations while they accept them emotionally.”
Attachment from child to mother is not the only fragile situation. Mothers can also lose their attachment. “Wholly external influences are capable of interfering with the mother’s tie to the child. When mother and infant are separated for long periods and the mother is relieved of all responsibility for the child—as happened in wartime England for safety’s sake or as happens in hospitals when either mother or child has to be isolated—under such conditions mothers have been seen to lose their attachment to the child, and to become unwilling to resume it. Such experiences make one feel that the mother’s attachment is bound up with the appeal made by an infant’s helplessness and urgent need for care rather than being a mere ‘instinct.’ This might explain too why mothers who entrust the care of their infants to paid nurses are so often described as ‘rejecting.’ On the whole, it is not the truly unwilling mother who exerts the most disastrous influences on her child’s future. When she refuses altogether to play her part, the door is left wide open for an accepting mother substitute, as found in adoption and in foster families. It is the mother who wavers between rejection and possessiveness who does the more irreparable harm by forcing her child into an unproductive partnership in which he fails to develop his capacities for object love.”
Some mothers are not just deliberating about their preferences and whether they can attach or not. Some are struggling to attach to reality and may not have boundaries. “The effect of a psychotic mother on the development of her child has been discussed frequently and by many authors in recent years. There is no doubt that infants may react to the lack of outgoing warmth in such a mother as if she ‘rejected’ them. On the other hand, harmful consequences of an opposite nature can also be observed. The psychotic mother may include a child in her own world of self-centered (narcissistic) feelings and reactions, regarding him as a part of her own self. The normal symbiosis of a mother and infant (see Mahler, 1952) may then become prolonged in an abnormal manner, and mother and child together become an isolated couple in an apparently hostile external world. Such a state of affairs delays, or prevents, the growing child’s normal adaptation to the social environment (see Bonnard, 1949).”
Infants are just at the beginning of developing a sense of time and they have no understanding of the wider world and the pressures parents are experiencing. “Such separations act on the child irrespective of their causes. Since the infant cannot grasp the reason for the mother’s disappearance, every separation equals for him desertion on her part. Before his sense of time develops, the pressure of his needs makes every period of waiting seem agonizingly long; therefore he does not distinguish between separations of short and long duration. Everybody’s sympathy and understanding are automatically extended to the infant whose mother dies; if the mother is absent merely for a few weeks, we are less concerned. Wrongly so; we know that the mother will return, the child does not. Separations between mother and infant are rejections, whether they are brought about for good or bad reasons, whether they are long or short. The infant who is torn from the partnership with his mother is emotionally orphaned, even though he may be an ‘artificial’ orphan with a living mother…The shock of separation is often expressed by disturbance of the body functions such as upsets of sleep, feeding, of the digestive apparatus; there is also at such times an increased susceptibility to infection. Further, many infants make backward moves in their development: those who have just learned to talk, give up speech; those who have just begun to move independently, give up walking; those who have already undergone toilet training, wet and soil again. It is almost invariably the most recent achievement in development which is lost first…It is revealing, for example, to learn in the analyses of adults who lost their mothers through death in infancy that, unconsciously, they have never ceased to blame them for desertion.”
Echoing object relations, so much of inner richness and inner wealth comes from our memories and adults can return to those memories and introvert their craving and gain appreciation for lost objects. Infants have not developed that capacity with any depth. For Anna, depth of memory with richness and satisfaction creates an internal security. Without that children will grow up expecting relationships to be shallow. They have nothing to compare to. “On the emotional side, all variations have been described, from incessant crying to silent despair. For the infant, to withdraw his feelings from the loved person seems to be as painful as it is for an adult in mourning. The main difference between the two emotional states seems to be that the adult is capable of withdrawing his feelings into himself and attaching them to an inner image of the lost object. The infant needs a living person in the external world who is capable of fulfilling his material needs besides serving as a love object: he cannot live without a mother substitute. Therefore, the interval between withdrawal of affection from the mother and search for another object is a short one. But this ability, or rather need, of the young child to form new ties should not deceive us as to the seriousness of what has happened. The first attempt at object love has been destroyed; the next one will not be of quite the same quality, will be more demanding, more intent on immediate wish fulfillments, i.e., further removed from the more mature forms of ‘love.’ Repeated ‘rejection by separation’ intensifies this process of deterioration and produces individuals who are dissatisfied, shallow, and, worst of all, promiscuous in their relationships.”
This feeling of security for Anna IS the feeling of confidence. The memories of love and care, if they are detailed and deep, provide a how-to manual on how to replicate those behaviors. When people don’t feel that sense of loss and vulnerable attachment, the internal compass, the role model that was internalized, is absent. Attachments orient us to keep us from being lost emotionally, and sometimes geographically: a feeling of homelessness. What stays in memory instead are shallow exchanges and transactional relationships are all that remain to satisfy short-term needs. There’s no sense of building and developing long-term projects with a loved object. The trust in tender love of the mother opens things up for having trust that other people have the ability to reciprocate in the same way, which is why parental templates influence who we are often attracted to. Trust leads to cooperation and synergy that makes relationships move smoothly with matching expectations. “The mother’s loving interest in the child ties him to her and he feels securely held in an atmosphere which is charged with her affection. When the charge (the [craving attachment]) diminishes, insecurity sets in, and the child feels ‘lost.’ When the infant is old enough to be capable of independent movement, he may even get lost physically; i.e., he may venture away from the mother into what is normally for him ‘out of bounds’ and not find his way back to her. There is an interesting analogy here between our own hold on our material possessions and a mother’s hold on her young child. We are apt to lose possessions if we withdraw interest from them, if ‘our mind is elsewhere.’ Mothers, under the same conditions, may lose their emotional hold on their young children; this, in its turn, may induce the child to stray, to lose himself, to run away.”
These are all comparisons with an ideal mother, but we know that life circumstances, and the changes in the mother’s emotions, make it near impossible to avoid some forms of rejection with temporary needs for space and rest, for example. The children need to develop enough understanding of the mother’s circumstances and learn about the pressures from the outside world, which entering school and becoming an adolescent can inform the child enough to sympathize. “Seen from the mother’s side, it is an unreasonable demand that there should be no fluctuations in the intensity of her feelings for the child. There are many other claims on her emotions. The most devoted mother of an infant may have older children who have older claims; there are the husband’s claims to satisfy and needs vary. Mothers may suffer the loss of another child or of their own parents. If this happens, their feelings become withdrawn from the infant and are engaged in mourning. Infants react to such happenings as to rejections and desertions, with illness, with standstills or regressions in development, with increased naughtiness and aggression toward the mother. The same happens if the mother falls into a morbid depression of some kind, or if there is an upheaval in her love life, or if there are troubles in the marital relations which absorb her interest.”
Rejections can also include the mother’s views of the child and if she has preferences for certain siblings. Is the child frequently dirty? Is the child too rambunctious and willful to control? Is the child easier to deal with when older and more independent? “Such alterations of rejection and acceptance (not of the child as a whole but of his changing aspects) are anchored in the depth of the mother’s mind. She cannot help reacting to (i.e., ‘rejecting’) the child if his behavior arouses old conflicts of her own. His oral demands on her arouse once more her own struggles with her own mother in her own babyhood. His dirtiness and the need for her to be concerned with his body products arouse fantasies and battles of the anal phase. Her reaction to the child’s phallic development will be determined by her castration complex and her penis envy. In short, the relationship to the developing infant shakes her personality to its foundations. Her behavior toward the child is understood best when viewed in terms of her own conflicts. She acts rejecting when she defends her own repressions, and accepting when the child’s behavior meets with secret wishes and fantasies of her own which she can tolerate.”
Children also imitate the predilections of the mother. Their skills and specialties provide character for the child, but what the parents are not good at cannot be taught, and therefore parental deficits are carried on. “It is a frequent occurrence that a mother is so fixed to a certain [craving] phase of her own development that her obvious predilection for it acts on the child as a seduction. Thus, mother and child as a couple may meet on the basis of an exaggerated sadomasochistic relationship, provoking each other to endless quarrels. Or their relationship may remain predominantly within the sphere of oral fantasies; in the later event, their partnership becomes the breeding ground for pathological reactions, such as battles over food, eating and stomach troubles, and attitudes of craving and addiction.”
To the relief of prospective mothers, it’s important to avoid perfectionism because desire is unlimited so no mother can fulfill a child totally without them moving the goal posts and raising expectations. “Although, as said before, no human being is wholly loved, there are some women who come very near to fulfilling this achievement for their child. They are, emotionally, mothers rather than wives, with few other ties and interests, to whom the possession of a child means the fulfillment of their deepest wishes. They give themselves unreservedly to the infant; they do not separate from him and they do not allow other claims to diminish their attention. Their infant frequently remains their only child. But, surprisingly enough, they too do not escape the blame of being ‘rejecting’ in the eyes of their children. It throws a new light on the factor of ‘rejection’ when we realize that no degree of devotion on the part of the mother can successfully cope with the boundless demands made on her by the child.”
Like in other intimate relationships, any independence, flaws, and imperfections can be magnified so that children may have a distorted expectation of a good mother and demand too much. Until they are able to compare their parents with the parents of their friends, they don’t have enough examples to compare with and appreciate what they have. “There is another, more intricate, factor which should not be underrated. Every good mother of an infant shares his experiences. Not only does she provide satisfactions, she also is at hand when the infant is uncomfortable, in pain, and suffering. It is not reasonable to expect that the child will connect her person only with his pleasures. As the first representative of the external world in which the infant has to learn to orient himself, she becomes the symbol of both frustration and satisfaction, pain and pleasure. The nearer she is to the child, the more convincingly will both roles be thrust on her. Paradoxically enough, the most devoted mother may in this way become the most rejecting one for the child.” Parents should not blame themselves for the child’s distortions and part of growing up is learning about proper expectations through education and knowledge of the adult world.
Aggression
Like many of Anna’s generation, she believed in the psychology of the bastard, the child who was treated with less respect for being an illegitimate child, born out of wedlock or the fruit of a betrayal. They likely would be the shallow ones with a streak of selfishness and a jaded view of social cohesion. Their view would be that all there is, is abandonment, betrayal, punishment, and impermanence. Those negative attitudes undermine long-term projects that turn into new “cannonball” generations: the psychology of suicide, ruin, rubble, trash, addiction, theft, and murder. Late theories of Sigmund Freud tried to point to unconscious attitudes that take over the mind and beliefs. Once a belief takes over it colors consciousness making it hard to see different points of view. I would certainly connect positive elements of the aggressive force to support love and contribution, as Anna pointed out, which is a healthy fusion of protection, but as she saw, the destructive forces can fuse loving playfulness with sadism and destroy instead. What seems at first as destruction just for fun, there is instead a deep down hatred of reality and a wanting of existence to end, a form of suicide or a destructive signal to ask for people of the life drive to incitement so that they can take the pathetic creature down out of their misery and change things from then on. The villain needs the hero to prove to him that his dark view is actually wrong. He needs the test of virtue or corruption will continue on in a cynical fashion. “In the further development of his theory of instincts Freud abandoned the conception of ‘ego instincts,’ decided to ascribe instinctual nature and origin to the aggressive manifestations, and thereby gave them in his evaluation equal status with the manifestations of sex. In this assumption, which is known as the ‘theory of the life and death instincts,’ the whole range of instinctual urges is grouped under these two main forces, the life force serving the purposes of preservation, propagation, and unification of life, the death instinct or destructive force serving the opposite aim of undoing connections and destroying life.”
With this understanding of life and death drives, one can learn about the internal battle that was unconscious, and awareness is a great way to notice when ruminations are out of control. Awareness allows one to stop spinning and focus on a learning mentality. Is one over controlling? Is one being to passive? Is one too tired and in need of rest? Is the aggression aimed towards oneself? Is there self-sabotage? Aggression is essentially effort that connects to tension and release. If tension continues without release at the time expected, then stress ensues. On the other hand, activities that are too easy can be boring. Of course, meditation can alleviate some of that as one learns that many forms of effort are a choice when you are aware. A lot of your standard of living can be benefited with meditative arts so that it’s not just about spending huge amounts of money to regulate emotions. Even love requires some effort and there will always be a need for rest and sleep. When there is enough rest, [craving] can finally regenerate, overflow into motor responses, and choose goals to press on the environment to alter it towards preference once again. “Sex is the representative of the life force, aggression of the destructive force. In clinical observation neither [life] nor aggression can be studied in a pure form. The two fundamental instincts combine forces with each other or act against each other, and through these combinations produce the phenomena of life. The development of aggression is inseparably bound up with the developmental phases of infantile sexuality. On each level of sex development (oral, anal, phallic) the aggressive urges manifest themselves in different ways, and by their manifestations lend force to the expressions of the child’s love life. Without this admixture of aggression, the [life] impulses remain unable to reach any of their aims.”
Lou Andreas-Salomé Pt. 8: https://rumble.com/v5s37ne-lou-andreas-salom-pt.-8.html
Lou Andreas-Salomé Pt. 9: https://rumble.com/v5uq6vh-lou-andreas-salom-pt.-9.html
Anna was very aware of certain parental styles that limited aggression too much because there was an attitude of all or nothing when many goals required a lot more effort than others. One doesn’t have to be impotent, but at the same time one doesn’t have to be a serial killer. There’s a certain balance that is required. Aggression to fuel the love is more balanced. Too little aggression is too weak, and a decoupling of aggression from love leads to all manner of destructiveness. “The fusion of [life] instincts with aggression makes it possible for the child to assert his rights to the possession of his love objects, to compete with his rivals, to satisfy his curiosities, to display his body or his abilities—even to obtain possession of his food and destroy it by eating it. Equally, in normal adult sex life, the carrying out of the sexual act presupposes on the part of the male sufficient aggression to obtain mastery over the sexual partner. Where in abnormal cases, through repression or inhibition of aggression, this admixture from the side of the destructive forces is lacking, sexuality becomes ineffective. In adult genital life this results in impotence. In the pregenital stages of childhood the clinical pictures produced are those feeding disturbances, weakness of emotional attachments, especially of the oedipus manifestations, inhibition of curiosity and intellectual achievements, loss of pleasure in play, etc. The aggressive urges, on the other hand, when they are for some reason not fused with the sexual urges, manifest themselves as purely destructive, criminal, and—in this form—uncontrollable and unmanageable tendencies.”
The life and death drives may involve the feeling of ambivalence and there is a worry that the aggression cannot be balanced properly. There’s a desire to live in a world of love and trust that is transcendent from a purely brutal Darwinian struggle. In reality, aggression can be supportive of love when there are common goals, but this balance is lost when major goals for individuals interfere with the goals of others or a group. It’s very easy for people to attain power, focus on themselves and not realize they are stepping on the toes of others who are more powerless. “This inability to establish purely positive relationships in real life creates the well-known longing of human beings for ‘pure love,’ which has found expression in countless fantasies, day-dreams, utopias, and other poetic productions…Those analysts who have adopted Freud’s theories of the life and death instincts consider aggression an inborn instinctual urge which develops spontaneously, in response to the environment, but is not produced by environmental influences. Those analysts who maintain his earlier ‘frustration theory’ regard aggression as the product of environmental influences, that is, as the individual’s answer to the thwarting of his instinctual wishes…Further controversial questions are whether the interplay between two biological forces of opposite nature is in itself sufficient to create a state of conflict in the mind; and, if so, how far this conflict, i.e., a basic ambivalence of feeling, is by its very nature of vital and pathogenic significance.”
Society wrestles with different types of entertainment, pleasure, and different views on what thriving is and there’s always a need to police certain activities, but at the same time allow enough controlled aggression for basic achievements, development of culture, and growth. For Anna, the ego has awareness of competing impulses and reactions, so that awareness is the beginning of being able to fuse opposites together. There’s a need for internal agents to find a way to work together for mutually satisfying goals, just like with people in external life. Awareness of the suitability of the impulses must come first so that unconscious action can be paused and reflected on. Understanding what would make the Id, Ego, and Super-ego happy at the same time allows for a clear conscience. The Super-ego looks at consequences. The Ego looks at logistics and action, while the Id dreams about satisfaction in a myriad of ways depending on what is accessible in the environment. Being aware of internal pain and learning how to adjust behavior to reduce it is a sign of mental development. “Clinical observation shows numerous states which represent a successful fusion between the destructive and erotic urges. (Eating, for instance, destroys the food for the purpose of incorporating it; in sexual intercourse the partner is aggressively mastered for the purpose of intimate union, etc.) Further, in young infants, love and hate, affection and anger, tenderness and aggression, the wish to destroy loved people or toys and the wish to preserve and have them, can be seen to appear in quick succession, seemingly unaffected by each other, each controversial striving attempting with full force to reach its own aim. The mental representatives of the two organic forces remain unrelated to each other so long as no central point of awareness is established in the personality. It is only the growth of this focal point (the ego) which results in the gradual integration of all instinctual strivings, and during this process may lead to clashes and realization of incompatibility between them. According to these views, therefore, the presence of mental conflicts and of the guilt feelings consequent on them presupposes that a specific, comparatively advanced stage in ego development has been reached.”
Paying attention to the consequences of different desires and aggressions is the best way to make priorities so that one can let go of the feeling of missing out, or FOMO, but Anna was focused more on pathological defenses and how they often respond when awareness is not so pervasive. “All psychoanalytic writers agree that, at some moment or other in the development of the young child, the aggressive urges become incompatible with other strivings or with the higher agencies in the individual’s mind. Aggression is then felt to be intolerable; the ideas, fantasies, and wishes representing it are feared as dangerous, provoke outbursts of anxiety, and are, for this reason, rejected by the mind…The methods used for their attempted elimination are the mechanisms of defense used by the ego to ward off and transform dangerous pregenital sexual strivings…When fused with the erotic impulses, the aggressive urges are relieved of their destructive qualities and make a decisive contribution to the purposes of life.” In a way, Anna wants people to take action, which is a mild form of aggression and one has to be able to disturb the environment enough to achieve basic goals.
Delinquency
Just like Melanie Klein, Anna Freud struggled with the distance and power differential between being an analyst in the same room as an analysand. It’s very easy for a patient to feel judged and under contempt. Melanie felt you had to put yourself in the shoes of the analysand so that their strange inner workings could be introjected enough to prevent theories and past experiences from effacing the uniqueness of the analysand that is present right now. Anna was influenced by Aichorn in the fact that psychologists are part of culture and both have demands on the patient to change in one way or another. If they are delinquents or criminals the demand for change is unavoidable, but to see how people get caught in the death drive, culture’s demands have to be treated as guardrails and there needs to be enough freedom and an array of choices for the patient to make their own way, even if there are commonsense protections and boundaries to compromise with. Without this nuance, the patient can sense contempt immediately and therapy could be no different than confiding to general people off the street. The analyst’s preferences have to take a backseat. The patient just has to stay out of jail or mental institutions. They don’t have to turn into a mirror image of the analyst. “People who cannot escape from their own superego demands and invariably remain identified with society fail to win the confidence of the delinquent or to understand the workings of his mind.”
Object Relations: Melanie Klein Pt. 2: https://rumble.com/v435lsq-object-relations-melanie-klein-pt.-2.html
Even if Anna felt different from Melanie in certain ways about child analysis, she agreed with her that a lot of psychology is best, just like with other medical advice, as prophylactic. Once the damage is done, there’s less certainty on what can be reversed or newly developed. “Since the recording of the observations which have led to this first tentative explanation of dissocial behavior, many workers and authors in all countries have confirmed and extended Aichhorn’s theories. Separation of children from their parents, prolonged absence, or death, of the parents, loss of affection for or of confidence in the parents, repeated change of foster homes, institutional life without provision for the development of personal attachments—all these have, in accordance with Aichhorn’s findings, been emphasized as the factors most frequently discovered when one investigates the histories of dissocial and delinquent children.”
The important development that is hard to make up for is when the child becomes satisfied enough by the mother’s care to be motivated to give back love to the mother. “By means of the constantly repeated experience of satisfaction of the first body needs, the [craving] interest of the child is lured away from exclusive concentration on the happenings in his own body and directed toward those persons in the outside world (the mother or mother substitute) who are responsible for providing satisfaction. In those cases where the mother is either absent, or neglectful, or emotionally unstable and ambivalent, and therefore fails to be a steady source of satisfaction, or in cases where the care of the infant is insufficient, or impersonal, or given by changing figures, the transformation of narcissistic [craving] into object [craving] is carried out inadequately. There remains a stronger tendency in all future life to withdraw [craving] from the love objects to the self whenever the object world proves to be disappointing.”
This fusion of aggression and control to support loving goals is supposed to couple at this time, but if the development never happens, aggression is more at cross-purposes with love. In psychoanalysis, when there’s fusion they use the term Binding, which is anti-chaos. The mind makes associations that are stable through craving and attachment. If there are no binding associations between aggression/effort and love, external sabotage, as well as internal, are more likely. It will be hard to make long lasting friendships and intimate relationships with common goals related to procreation, building, and mutual development. “The blunting of craving development which results from these early deprivations leads further to an inadequate binding of the destructive urges in the child. Normally, the destructive impulses ally themselves with the child’s expressions of object love on the pregenital levels of infantile sexual development and thereby lend force and vigor to the preoedipal attachment to the mother and to the manifestations of the oedipus complex. Where the child’s love life is deficient, the destructive urges remain more isolated and manifest themselves more independently in various ways, from merely overemphasized aggressiveness to wanton destructiveness, i.e., in attitudes which are in themselves the most frequent sources of delinquency and criminality.”
Aggression, control, and manipulation can move outwardly into the narcissistic realm of psychoses where people external to the subject are treated as extensions in that others are instruments and tools for self-gratification only. These fantasies act as a psychosis because the narcissistic daydreaming becomes a normal mode of being for the narcissistic subject. “It is a further step in social maladjustment when the fantasies, displaced to the environment, do not remain in the realm of thought and feeling but lead to direct action. The environment is then not merely understood in terms of fantasy but treated on the same basis. Life, in these circumstances, is a form of psychodrama with the child being concerned with acting as stage manager and as the central figure. The other members of the community, adults as well as children, are used by him as actors on the stage who have to play prescribed roles according to his dictates.”
Narcissistic Supply – Freud and Beyond – WNAAD: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html
When a child loses self-esteem, which is a loss in their belief in their own power, their lack of action to change their environments, means they behave according to their belief and create self-fulfilling prophecies. It’s like a self-sadism where one hates oneself and acts accordingly. “Children who, in this manner, act out passive-feminine or masochistic fantasies in school actually succeed in being punished more often or more severely than others. They provoke the teachers by behaving insolently or aggressively, or by failing conspicuously in their work, or by managing to be found out in all the small current misdeeds which, normally, remain unnoticed. They invite the dislike of their classmates to such an extent that they become the butt for their aggression and even persecution. In day schools, it is no rare event to see such a child running home breathlessly with a whole horde of pursuers at his heels. In boarding schools, the persecutory actions of the others may reach their height at bedtime or in secret scenes of bullying. The maltreatment may be focused in one teacher or one especially strong and active classmate, or may come more diffusely from all teachers and a vague group of children…In the absence of personal persecutors the maltreatment may be ascribed to impersonal factors. Such children run to school breathlessly in the morning, pursued by the idea of being late; they constantly feel oppressed by the lack of time for finishing their work; by feelings of incapacity and inferiority; by the pressure of work in general, etc. They live at home, in school, and in the wider environment as in a world peopled by oppressors, and in fact they succeed in being treated with unkindness, severity, suspicion, hostility.”
Where it may be hard to see the pleasure in masochism, which may be a pleasure in not taking responsibility for oneself, not willing to take minimal risks, and deciding to follow a sadistic master. Like a repetition compulsion there may be an inner fantasy to mimic the sadist authority when one gets tired and bored of masochism. The sadist likes finding a masochist to abuse because it confirms a downward comparison, and the pleasure of mastery, control, and the reduction of vulnerability is the reward. There’s an extreme insecurity there because a person who needs to be so cruel must demand excessively more confirmations than regular people do when they target some harmless children, women, the elderly, the disabled, or helpless animals. Like in Flow states, the fighting back, if it’s not effective, just adds a spicy challenge and flavor, which motivates extra punishment to secure obedience, like a slave master punishing a slave that was caught trying to escape. Deep down the master may be trying to revenge against a prior helplessness and their lack of empathy is a sign of their priority for mastery. The sadist may unconsciously stage the scene for the benefit of an internalized masochistic other—a fantasy of being seen as the punisher or the one with the power. “The corresponding sadistic fantasies are usually acted out with either animals or younger children as objects. Maltreatment of animals has always been observed in boys during the latency period. When this urge is directed toward small insects, for instance, flies, it may take the form of deliberate and intricate torture. (For instance: to turn insects on their backs and enjoy their hopeless efforts to right their position; to pull wings off flies and watch their helplessness; to permit an insect to escape, only to haul it back to renewed torture at the last moment.) With bigger animals, such as dogs, cats, etc., a fear of retaliation usually accompanies the sadistic actions. The victim, being less helpless, is expected, at any moment, to scratch, bite, etc., in self-defense. This fear of a counterattack seems merely to heighten the boy’s pleasure in hurting the animal. Some children take special pleasure in scaring animals (e.g., chickens); others are fascinated by the idea of drowning animals (kittens), and are delighted to watch their struggles in the water. Many boys are fascinated by the idea or sight of pig-killing. Similar sadistic actions are directed toward weaker children in the form of bullying.”
How to gain Flow in 7 steps: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html
R.E.M. – World Leader Pretend: https://youtu.be/WwS9_vqdHcQ?si=HbqYujI8h3lES5dJ
That cruelty can also be found with bystanders, onlookers, and enablers who fail to stop the destruction, which is called scopophilia. Like in sports, one can enjoy a hated team being beaten by another that is less hated, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” etc. “Sadistic fantasies may also be lived out in the role of onlooker, when other children are criticized or punished. Some teachers believe that such scenes appeal to the pupils’ sense of justice and serve to establish moral values, the distinction between right and wrong. They act as they do in ignorance of the fact that punishment in front of the class serves as a stimulus to certain scoptophilic attitudes in fulfilling a fantasy where the child is witness to a sadistic scene which is enacted before his eyes. Where these fantasies play an important role in the child’s emotional life, such scenes of ‘crime and punishment’ may for the child be the highlights of his school experience.”
Anna’s description of the perversion of exhibitionism sounds quite a lot like narcissism, but their similarity is the addictive rush and high to get as much attention as possible, even if it’s negative. The intelligent survival aspect of it is the understanding that one needs social connections to achieve success and mastering this skill, even if it’s nothing virtuous or laudable, does confer reward in certain social circles. The dangers are the possible conflict that may also be attracted as well as overextension with too many social projects. “Community life in a classroom offers special opportunities for the acting out of exhibitionistic fantasies. Some children succeed in continually concentrating the attention of the class on themselves, either through excellent performance in work or games, or through heroic behavior of some kind, standing up to the teacher, fighting bullies, defending the rights of the weaker ones, by showing themselves indifferent to danger, to bodily pain, to punishment. Where the expression of direct exhibitionistic fantasies is inhibited, the exhibitionistic aim is pursued in a disguised manner. Instead of being the hero in his class, the child may persistently play the fool, invite ridicule instead of admiration, and thereby concentrate attention on himself as effectively, although in a negative manner…The acting out of positive exhibitionistic fantasies may fall into social channels and thus serve the aim of adjustment to the community (heroic, unselfish behavior, good performance of difficult tasks, etc.). Even then, there is a socially disruptive element in the fact that it is compulsive. Whatever the circumstances, under the pressure of this fantasy, the child has to excel at all costs, his interest is primarily concentrated on being conspicuous; the activities which help him to achieve his aim are of secondary importance.”
Negativism and Emotional Surrender
Signs of a withdrawal of life and the death drive taking over can be seen in Anna’s description of Negativism. It can appear in neurosis frustrations but also in escapes into psychosis, and as a giving up attitude that children can be lost in.
“Certain disturbances in the capacity for object love manifest themselves after the infant stage:
(a) the negativistic behavior of young children who pass through phases where simple positive responses such as greeting, thanking, cooperating in the daily routines of being washed, dressed, etc., become an insuperable difficulty;
(b) a similar state of negativistic reaction in adolescence when all objects, and even the simplest demands made by them, are met with a negative response;
(c) ‘negativism’ to objects as a typical symptom in schizophrenic states;
(d) states of blocking of affect in neurotic patients when important and unimportant figures in the object world are treated with the same apparent indifference; this includes the well-known symptom of the inability to mourn the loss of formerly loved persons;
(e) ’emotional impotence’ in male patients who have regained their physical potency only in analysis.”
Love is risky and because one isn’t guaranteed to receive love, the work to attain it may appear to be too frightening or a chore. There’s a defense to protect oneself from love which reverses the normal situation. It’s like a hero who feels their efforts will be exploited and decides to abandon the quest to meaninglessness. “Such persons see the relation to a love object exclusively in passive terms. To love means: to be maltreated, kicked about, impoverished, tormented, possessed. To love signifies therefore not a gain, but a loss, against which the individual defends himself. These attitudes have their climax in the fantasy of entry into the womb, in which the passive fantasy reaches its height at the moment of actual masculine potency. Paradoxically then, for these patients, the symptom of impotence in intercourse serves the preservation of their masculinity.” The passivity alternates between a need for a caretaker, but then there is a fear of engulfment. There’s a lack of adult independence with normal boundaries. Boundaries require some push back, but when there’s not enough aggression to do this, the subject falls into sadomasochistic relationships again and again by sending a signal of weakness for predators who search for such signals of easy prey. “The passive surrender to the love object may signify a return from object love proper to its forerunner in the emotional development of the infant, i.e., primary identification with the love object. This is a regressive step which implies a threat to the intactness of the ego, i.e., a loss of personal characteristics which are merged with the characteristics of the love object. The individual fears this regression in terms of dissolution of the personality, loss of sanity, and defends himself against it by a complete rejection of all objects (negativism). This assumption is confirmed by clinical examples of patients who show an alternation between states of negativism and states of complete emotional surrender to an object.” These insights are similar to Margaret Mahler’s theory on Separation-individuation.
Protecting Posterity
Anna Freud’s later career was to spread the current knowledge which she did with visits to the United States and the lectures she made there. She was involved in developing the Sigmund Freud Archives to preserve his work. There was a lot to do with translating, including letters between Freud and others like Jung. “It seems to be my fate…” Anna once declared. She became more like an ambassador for psychoanalysis during a time when each country was debating lay analysis and whether analysts could be non-medical without doctorates and such. From Anna’s vantage point, there needed to be a collection of variance data between normal and abnormal development so as to get a handle on the myriad problems children go through as they develop. These problems may include a variety of symptoms that are not totally catastrophic and pathological. This would reverse the direction of starting from the worst pathology and then making conclusions about what should be normal. “We have broken with the tradition according to which every mental difficulty is seen and explained by comparison with severe pathological patterns, and, instead, try to see it against the background of the norm, expectable for the particular child’s age, and to measure its distance from that.” Developmental pathology “summarized a wide range of developmental irregularities or complete arrests producing not psychic conflict but defects in a child’s psychic structure and personality.”
Anna’s description of “borderline cases” was more a description of how to expand symptoms and disorders to develop more useful categories for treatment, and this is especially true when it comes to analyzing children compared with adults. “Anna Freud used the term ‘borderline’ not just for children who were psychically on the border between neurosis and psychosis, but for those on the border of autism, of mental deficiency, of delinquency, of perversion, and so forth. That is, at the Clinic the term was used for all evolving states with mixed features that were unclassifiable by the traditional standards…Children’s symptoms, Anna Freud noted, are not the same as those of adults. They are related to particular developmental stages and they are—often—transitory. Children are in process; the nucleus of an adult’s pathology is not. Because taking analytic bearings from a child’s symptoms can be very misleading, Anna Freud simply and startlingly suggested that this traditional method not be applied to children. ‘Once we decide to disregard the diagnostic categories derived from descriptive psychiatry for adult psychopathology and to play down the importance of symptomatology as such, we can hope to be alerted more vigorously to…other aspects of the patient’s personality. Where children are concerned, these will be mostly developmental ones.'”
By creating profiles, timing delays could be compared with more long-term problems, but a problem in the end has to do with self-sufficiency and how much care a person actually needs. “The Profile combined basically two types of descriptions. The first was a composite consisting of specific assessments of the structural, dynamic, economic, and genetic aspects of a patient’s psychic functioning. Each assessment was sketched from one of the different types of metapsychological viewpoints Freud had mapped through the historical course of his work and Anna Freud had taken over—in their historical completeness. The second was a composite made by considering a child’s achievements and arrests and regressions along a number of different ‘lines of development.’ The prototypical development line, the one that wove through most of the more specific ones Anna Freud detailed, was given the title ‘from dependency to emotional self-reliance and adult object relationships.’ The [craving] stages Freud had cataloged—oral, anal, phallic—are the maturational base, the general growing-up program for any child’s procession from being bound in a biological unity with its mother to living independently and directing its instinctual, emotional, and intellectual attention outside of its own family…’Body independence,’ she noted, involves lines leading from sucking to rational eating, from wetting and soiling to bladder and bowel control, from irresponsibility to responsibility in body management. Two other lines were of particular importance; one tracing emergence from egocentricity (or primary narcissism) to companionship with others as ‘partners and objects in their own right,’ and one tracing a child’s play with its body (autoerotism) and its mother’s body to play with ‘transitional objects’ (the phrase was Winnicott’s) and toys to that play-transforming activity that is work. This last line, from play to work, was a particularly original contribution.” These insights combined well with modern day social work, which directly focuses on helping people to be able to meet their needs as independently as possible.
In the past, only when problems were severe and very noticeable would there be interventions with the likely adult patient, but by watching development step-by-step, important delays and arrests could be assessed closer to real time. “The metapsychological descriptions were oriented toward diagnosis of the structural, dynamic, economic, and genetic factors that combine in hysterias, obsessional syndromes, and phobias. In diagnosing these infantile neuroses, the analyst looks for signs of trauma and of conflict between the psychic agencies followed by anxiety, defense, and compromise (or symptom) formation. The developmental lines were oriented toward ‘developmental psychopathology,’ which can be seen clearly when there is unevenness in development along the different lines. The manifestations are psychosomatic symptoms, backwardness, and the atypical and borderline states, and Anna Freud assessed these according to a scale that ranged between variations of normality and complete cessation of progressive development.”
Because of the complexity, one has to look at external and internal conflict to entertain multiple causes for a difficulty. “Progress on the lines is interfered with constantly by conflict, repression and consequent regression, while the conflicts themselves and quite especially the methods available for their solution are wholly dependent on the shape and level of the personal development which has been reached.” Because Anna Freud found confidence in outward manifestations of symptoms as a way to diagnose, she could sidestep some of the mystery of object-relations. “Her positive alternative was to focus on the many types of observable developmental steps in the first year, and to make assessments from these, rather than to focus on what cannot ever be reconstructed with certainty—the object relations of the preverbal infant. Melanie Klein did not, unfortunately, live long enough to address, if she had wished to, this addition to Anna Freud’s evolving work: she died in 1960, at the age of seventy-eight.”
Anna Freud was becoming more like a reviewer as she saw many good works influence her from Margaret Mahler, Michael Balint, René Spitz, Willi Hoffer, Heinz Hartmann, and so on. Anna’s later years were concerned with succession. People like Joseph Sandler were able to quietly merge the many offshoots that competed with Ego Psychology, and the Diagnostic profile morphed into more developed reference materials like the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual, which also focuses on daily functioning as an important measurement tool to help with grey areas in severity. Being diagnosed can be a black and white situation, but the level of functioning for a person is important in determining how much help and therapy is actually needed. The authors articulated the challenge of classifying human beings. “For decades many clinicians, especially psychodynamic and humanistic therapists, have resisted thinking about their patients in terms of categorical diagnoses…The Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM) reflects an effort to articulate a psychodynamically oriented diagnosis that bridges the gap between clinical complexity and the need for empirical and methodological validity…As psychoanalysts, we know that each patient is unique. No two people with depression, bereavement, anxiety or any other mental illness or disorder will have the same potentials, needs for treatment or responses to efforts to help. Whether or not one finds great value in the descriptive diagnostic nomenclature exemplified by the DSM-5, psychoanalytic diagnostic assessment is an essential complementary assessment pathway which aims to provide an understanding of each person in depth as a unique and complex individual and should be part of a thorough assessment of every patient. Even for psychiatric disorders with a strong biological basis, psychological factors contribute to the onset, worsening, and expression of illness. Psychological factors also influence how every patient engages in treatment; the quality of the therapeutic alliance has been shown to be the strongest predictor of outcome for illness in all modalities.”
These tools reduce moral panic that could stem from resources like the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), for example with severe disorders of Schizophrenia, and aggressive Cluster B personality disorders. Despite a diagnosis, the danger each person poses to the public is different, of course this is an area of contention. Many people want more deterrents to criminal behavior and others find categories can be inaccurate and dehumanize people who may not have a criminal record, and any predictions could look too much like a Pre-Crime, Minority Report, dystopia where people are guilty before they act. In areas of criminology, the Historical, Clinical, Risk Management Manual (HCR-20) provides guidelines for violence risk assessments to reduce moral panic while at the same time protecting the public.
Pre Cog Summary-Minority Report: https://youtu.be/arACDYMiNuI?si=JEl3OGmFakcbIYVw
As Anna Freud aged, she received a lot of rewards, but she tried to stay equanimous about it all. She once said to the Foundations’ Fund for Research in Psychiatry, “I wonder whether you know the North German proverb that ‘one receives a good soup when one is ill, and a good name when one is dead.’ With this in mind, I feel that I am receiving the latter part too early.” She was suffering from anemia and required blood transfusions to maintain energy and continue her preservation work. Much like her father, she wanted to work with solid foundations before going off into wild tangents. Anna’s private views were one of disappointment with these other methods. She responded to Harold Blum’s report of the 1975 APA Congress: “Where you still give them the benefit of the doubt, I am afraid I am already fully convinced that most of the avenues of thought presented to us do not lead to anything constructive. I think that instead of further developing psychoanalytic thought there is a definite tendency to destroy the gains and advances which have been made already, and to substitute for them something less valuable. The difficulty which you as well as I meet in discussion is of course that all these so-called advances are made under the flag of progress, and that therefore anybody who does not welcome them is looked at as ‘orthodox’ and ‘conservative,’ which I believe neither you nor I are.”
She re-read Freud’s letters, especially of those with Jung, and learned to control stress by reducing her expectations of others. “I can never read the end of this correspondence without getting quite sad and depressed about the turn it takes. She felt her father’s disappointment in Jung as her own, and she also connected her own struggle of her father’s pre-World War I years. The lesson of the correspondence was not to expect too much of the next generation, not to put too much pressure on the ‘heirs.’ Reading in the correspondence how much hope her father had placed on Jung’s personal charm and great talents, Anna Freud was reconfirmed in her personal policy: ‘not to make public pronouncements about the past or future of psychoanalytic work and other people’s part in it. As a subject, it is much too complex and too many opinions of the positive or negative kind are vented about it anyway.'”
Like Blum, Anna Freud didn’t like the “mysticism and obscurity” of other methods, and the obsession about the analysts themselves. “But Anna Freud’s rejection of her colleagues’ personalized quest for identity was just a part of her hope that questions about the identity of psychoanalysis itself would be properly framed. She recognized that the key site of controversy in the 1970s among analysts of adults was, at bottom, technical. Analysts who were making efforts to treat borderline patients and psychotics psychoanalytically were constantly faced with a decision: to modify the theory and technique or to acknowledge that the theory could comprehend more than the technique could cure. In her own work, Anna Freud had for more than a decade been giving careful attention to developmental pathologies, a domain quite different from that of the infantile neuroses that her father had explored. She admitted, however, that while the developmental pathologies could be mapped or reconstructed with extrapolations from classical psychoanalytic theory—chiefly, with her own concept of developmental lines—they could very seldom be cured with standard child analytic techniques. She and her coworkers experimented with modifications of technique, but they never felt that these modifications cast the original child analytic techniques in question. Techniques that can cure an infantile neurosis and techniques that have some effect on a developmental pathology work in different ways.”
Anna disliked the feminism of the 1970s and she pushed back on them when they radicalized gender psychology by making it all cultural. She did admit that many of Sigmund Freud’s ideas about women would be outdated now that women, including herself, were able to work in many different professions, but she didn’t want to lose distinctions between inherent bisexuality, child development, puberty and eventually a leaning towards masculinity or femininity. “The anatomical difference between penis and vagina, between impregnation and giving birth, and its decisive impact on psychic development are pushed aside in the passionate efforts to free women from the subjugation in which they have in fact been held for centuries and to put women in a position that in every respect equals that of their male partners.” How much of sexuality is actually imitated, which is what culture is based on, imitation, and how much is biology? Of course, these questions are still with us now and people fight over what is constitutional and what is borrowed from political culture.
Anna and supporters like Eissler towards the end of her life were focused on all the debunking craze of the 1960s and 1970s, including theories of Sigmund Freud contracting a Faustian bargain with the devil, and cocaine usage influencing his theories. They hated biographer Paul Roazen and others who published what she thought was gossip from Carl Jung or just inferences from Freud’s work. She also didn’t like quotes being taken out of context or misleading paraphrases. “Even though Roazen professes to have admiration for analysis itself, he is busy trying to dig up whatever negative facts about personalities he can find. This includes my father and me and what he cannot find he invents.” Because there’s so much pro and anti-Freud material out there Anna felt that “the only antidote to assaults upon [Freud’s] person and his work was his own voice.”
The example I often use is that of Jeffrey Masson who assumed that Freud “made a great mistake in 1897 giving up the idea that his patients must have been seduced as children for the idea that all children entertain love fantasies about their parents, Oedipal fantasies, whether they have undergone a seduction or not.” By reading Freud’s texts, as well as later psychoanalysts, both were written about and both situations can co-exist. Freud talked about it, as well as Ferenczi, and the term they used were “seductions,” but children can be envious about sharing the attention they get from parents as well. It would be extreme to say that there were only fantasies and no seductions, or to say all these Oedipus Complex materials arising from free-association are evidence of 100% seductions. Confusion was also natural in that the method of free association is hardly foolproof to show that one was sexually abused beyond just inference and symbolism. In other cases, there could have been a seduction, and the therapist just forced the memory into an Oedipus or Electra fantasy. Therapists have to be careful because unless a true resonant memory arises in a patient, mere symbolism and inference would be too weak to hold up in a court of law, for example. Just like in other modalities, like past-life regression, so much cannot be proven, and investing emotion in belief towards something that may not be true could actually increase trauma. The best evidence was often found when perpetrators made a confession in analysis themselves, including not only parents but governesses at the time.
Perversion Part 1: Incest – Ferenczi and Beyond: https://psychreviews.org/perversion-incest/
What mattered, and still matters in any therapy, are treatments that have positive impacts and parallel theories to explain them, so it’s always about the results. Whether Freud’s ideas were replaced, or simply renamed, there are more options now than ever for patients. Anna may have been focused on defending a modality, but the reality is that once the cat is out of the bag, there’s no way to stop the spread of innovations. This tension for people to find their own place in the sun was always about financial security and pride. People will take the ideas, change things, sometimes in good ways, but also in obscurantist ways, and then write a book and start a following to make a career. Anna wanted people to develop a lifestyle out of psychology, and the best way, as I am doing right here, is to just read the conflicting points of view and see what sticks. “We are raising new generations of psychoanalysts all over the world. Nevertheless, we have not yet discovered the secret of how to raise the real followers, men and women who make use of psychoanalysis to its very limits: for the understanding of themselves; of their fellow beings; for communicating with the world at large; in short, for a way of living.”
Dorothy Burlingham was also devoted to work towards her last days. Together with Anna they bought a country cottage in County Cork, Ireland in the 1960s which provided a lot of happiness and inspiration for what a successful community should look like. True to their personalities, they tried to live it in a psychoanalytical way. Dorothy described the location as “a very lively small port and beyond there are many lovely islands. The country is very beautiful, very rocky and between the steep rocks [there are] many beautiful beaches. There is something very fascinating about the atmosphere & clouds and colours…it is so paintable and the people are unspoiled, very friendly and expecting everybody to be as kindly as they are themselves. It gives one such a feeling, that’s the way people should be.” In 1975, Dorothy celebrated her 50th anniversary of meeting Anna. “She has a talent like her father’s to see things clearly, to see further than others, and to follow what she believes in without reservations. She loves to fulfill needs. She can enjoy so much too, beauty of the intellect as well as the soul. I have been very lucky.”
When enjoying site seeing in Ireland, analyst Susan Vas Dias described what she could see of their friendship. “Along a particular stretch, the fuchsia climbs so high on either side that it almost meets overhead. The world seemed to consist of green leaves through which are glimpsed blue sky, fast racing clouds and horses grazing in the heat of the far-off fields. Mrs. Burlingham and Miss Freud stood next to their white Mini, which was stopped almost in the centre of the road. I was concerned that they might have run into difficulty, pulled over and asked if they needed any help. Miss Freud smiled and said, ‘No, thank you. We’re just two old ladies who both want to see. We take turns, one drives, one sees. This is our changeover point. Beautiful, isn’t it?’ I agreed, and feeling almost an intruder, said good-bye and left them standing together in the stillness.”
They worked together until the end and enjoyed birthdays and holidays when possible. “On the evening of November 19, 1979, a Monday, Dorothy died—with Anna Freud sitting quietly in her room, in their house. Anna Freud was numb, and spoke in the terms she had used when she lost her father:
There is very little that one can say, except perhaps to be glad that she was still there to enjoy the conference and one last session of our book Nr. 3. I still told her what we discussed on the next two days, and she was interested as usual. Perhaps one should also say that it is a boon to be quite oneself until the very end and to die without being an invalid for a long time. But it is not so easy to be grateful to fate when one really feels the opposite.
Anna’s health deteriorated not too long afterwards. When she suffered a stroke she was relieved that Dorothy Burlingham had only died a few years earlier, and remarked that “I am glad Dorothy did not see me like this, she would have minded so.” She could still dictate some letters and do some knitting but things declined further. “Struggling for words, Anna Freud asked Manna Friedmann to stop by 20 Maresfield Gardens on her way to the hospital: she would find hanging in Anna Freud’s bedroom closet the Professor’s Londenmantel, which had been ritualistically cleaned and refurbished every year since the end of the war. Then, when they went off to the park, the Kinderfrau and Anna Freud, she, shrunken to the size of a schoolgirl, sat wrapped inside her father’s big wool coat…Anna Freud’s last days were so full of misery that even her strong fantasies were of little help. She had only recent memories for solace—though their roots went deep. During her long hospital stay, Manna Friedmann had often pushed her in a wheelchair to the nearby paths of Hampstead Heath, to the lily pond, where they could throw bread crumbs to the ducks and watch the children sailing toy boats.” As the summer passed, her condition worsened to its final stage. “The shaking became so extreme by the seventh of October that a neurologist who had been consulted before came to the house and prescribed an opiate to quell it. Like her father before her, she had been brought to the limit of her tolerance, and she had said in her halting voice, ‘I cannot stand it any more.’ Early in the morning of October 9, she died in her restless sleep.”
For both women, the funerals played the music of Mahler’s The Song Of The Earth:
It blows coolly in the shadows of my pines.
I stand here and wait for my friend;
I wait to bid him a last farewell.
I yearn, my friend, at your side
to enjoy the beauty of this evening.
Where are you? You leave me long alone!
The Writings of Anna Freud, Vol 4: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780701203184/
The Writings of Anna Freud, Vol 5 – Anna Freud: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780823668748/
The Writings of Anna Freud Vol. 6: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780823668755/
The Writings of Anna Freud Vol. 7: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780823668762/
The Writings of Anna Freud, Vol. 8: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780823668779/
The Last Tiffany: a biography of Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780689118708/
Lingiardi V, McWilliams N. The psychodynamic diagnostic manual – 2nd edition (PDM-2). World Psychiatry. 2015 Jun;14(2):237-9.
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/