Ego Psychology: Anna Freud Pt. 2

Dorothy Burlingham

In keeping with the emphasis Anna put on the Ego, she noticed the importance of action and how repression could inhibit people from living their lives as a participant and turn them into spectators. There’s an element of risk involved when sticking one’s neck out for one’s dreams and goals, but many people are risk averse and prefer to stay on the sidelines. Today this is called codependency, but at that time Anna called it “overgoodness,” like being a goody two-shoes. One can be conditioned into shame for wanting something for oneself and then all of one’s life goals are caught in suspended animation. Resting in the dreams of the super-ego, like watching a satisfying movie, is enough for some people, but an action oriented person wants to look back on what was built and appreciate that instead. What drove that feeling for Anna was her Etwas-Haben-Wollen, which was her sense of lack and emptiness that could not be filled by her professional success alone. Anna “told Eitingon, with the children she had in analysis at that particular time, she did feel a very human need for more than good analytic work.” There was also criticism from many historically informed people who were interested in psychoanalysis. Freud’s analysis of her daughter had incestuous overtones for them and his fame and success quite possibly limited Anna’s life trajectory. Freud needed a successor that would protect his legacy against heresy, as well as a nurse, and Anna would be attracted to a burgeoning career that was more exciting than teaching.

At the time of this revelation of “overgoodness,” Anna was analyzing Bob and Mabbie Burlingham. “Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham had brought her asthmatic oldest son, Bob, aged ten, to Vienna in the fall of 1925, seeking help for the psychological problems that had accrued to her son’s illness. When Anna Freud agreed to take Bob, Dorothy moved to Vienna with her other three children—Mary (Mabbie), Katrina (Tinky), and Michael (Mikey). [Their friends the] Sweetzers also came, and shared a house with the Burlinghams, so that their children could be treated. Dorothy then established herself in analysis with Theodor Reik—having been too shy to seek out Sigmund Freud—and eventually arranged for Anna Freud to treat her younger children, starting with Mabbie.”

The difficulties didn’t end with the children and the family dynamic was being exposed. “Dorothy Burlingham’s husband, Robert, a surgeon, suffered from a mental illness that had been not so much treated as contained in several American mental institutions. He eventually followed his wife to Europe and consulted with Ferenczi, but he was quite opposed to psychoanalysis and never found any other kind of help for his manic-depressive syndrome. Distraught over the effects her husband’s illness and episodic institutionalizations had had on their children, [Dorothy] wanted to keep them away from him. But she had to contend with his continuing hope that the family would be reunited, and with efforts by his father, Charles Culp Burlingham, a prominent New York lawyer and political figure, to draw the children away from Dorothy, from psychoanalysis, and from the Jewish Freuds. Dorothy’s twin older sisters, Julia and Comfort, two stepsiblings, Charles and Mary, and her father, Louis Comfort Tiffany, the interior decorator and glass designer, lived in New York, so in Vienna she depended on servants for help with her household and on her American friends the Sweetzers for companionship. The Freuds, when she met them, offered a context and comfort as well as psychoanalysis.”

Anna’s countertransference towards those children went in a different line from Melanie Klein’s. There was always a worry about getting too involved with patients in analysis, but these situations were invariably with adults, but from Anna’s point of view, children need development, otherwise known as parenting, much more than analysis. “…She had ‘thoughts which go along with my work but do not have a proper place in it.’ She put her problem simply: ‘I think sometimes that I want not only to make them healthy but also, at the same time, to have them, or at least have something of them, for myself. Temporarily, of course, this desire is useful for my work, but sometime or another it really will disturb them, and so, on the whole, I really cannot call my need other than ‘stupid.’ Having admitted this much, Anna Freud went on: ‘Towards the mother of the children it is not very different with me.’ Her confession ended with: ‘Curiously enough, though, I am very much ashamed of all these things, especially in front of Papa, and therefore I tell him nothing about it. This [about the Burlinghams, children and mother] is only a small illustration, but actually I have this dependency, this wanting-to-have-something—even leaving my profession aside—in every nook and cranny of my life.'”

Anna had these desires for a family that got enmeshed with her professional life, but it was something her father was ambivalent about, and this ambivalence mirrored in her. Anna’s internal conflict was the question of how one can preserve Freud’s legacy, which will provide pleasure of recognition from others, and have a family at the same time, which is a direct pleasure for oneself. Anna’s other great philosophical influence was Lou Andreas-Salomé, who found her happiness in career as well, but there was another barrier to understanding, which was Lou’s zealous avoidance of having children. “[Anna] told Eitingon that she had tried, unsuccessfully, to discuss her desire for confirmation from others and for ‘something’ for herself with [Lou]: ‘I once spoke with Lou about this years ago. She herself is so enormously distanced from it, though, that we finally both had to laugh about our mutual—not to be overcome by psychoanalytic knowledge—and complete inability to understand each other.'” This lack of trust in Lou led to her published letters with her being not very illuminating of their psychology as they tended to be more like friends talking about current events rather than about deep psychoanalytic insights. “When [Anna] kept from her father her feelings about the Burlinghams, she also kept them from Frau Lou.” This is also to keep in mind that Lou was very thankful for Sigmund Freud who provided the career satisfaction she was always looking for. At this time, she was very loyal to Sigmund, and outside of debates over narcissism, she was essentially a follower after her training analysis with him. Anna confessing to Lou would be like confessing to her father.

Lou Andreas-Salomé Pt. 9: https://rumble.com/v5uq6vh-lou-andreas-salom-pt.-9.html

Anna also hinted at her disconnection from her parents, because she was raised by a nanny. That disconnection could lead to a weaker object constancy, in that it’s hard to make bonds and to keep them when developing new relationships, especially if children draw on parental experiences to inform new friendships and intimate relationships. Firstly, this can come about from childhood neglect, which makes it easier to forget irrelevant people, and also leads to a habit of treating people based on utility, out of desperation and the practical reality of having to rely on oneself when nobody is there. Secondly, the experience of not being able to have repeated exchanges and bond with friendly people, free of ulterior motives, leads to mistrust and a belief that everyone will always have ulterior motives. Ulterior motives lead to sabotage of one’s goals and detours to satisfy others, again in the codependent way. The hunger for reciprocal relationships needs satisfaction from social connections with encouraging allies that share goals.

Parents at the beginning have the job of developing and protecting the child, so their goals are one and the same, but sooner or later there needs to be an independence to satisfy personal cravings, so as to avoid becoming a trophy for the parents in adulthood, and be restricted by their preferences, to which the only reward is appreciation through childish regression. All the men that cycled through Anna’s life, like Bernfeld and Jones, would seem to Anna to have ulterior motives that would interfere with her career aspirations, by having children and being second fiddle to their career goals. She would have to give up publishing, along with the pleasure of recognition, while focusing exclusively on the pleasure of love of family and love from children as being enough. Focusing only on career would make her feel that vacuum of being childless, so Anna had a desire to have both, if a way could be found. Seeing ulterior motives makes one want to cycle from one person to another until a new stable family situation is found, and one ascends to authority to make important decisions in the competitive world, and bask in the love of family and cooperation. There’s also that recurring debate that Lou and Anna promote, in that people need to figure out things for themselves and that may make subjects entertain alternative lifestyles. To experience things in a phenomenological way creates more aliveness compared to following dry and boring logistics. Then when one is sensitive enough to find gaps in cultural procedures, they can discover a new way of doing things. This meant that Anna exhausted all the wisdom she could find from her heroes.

Max Eitingon ended up being the shoulder to cry on, “and created a quasi-analytic situation in which she could try to overcome the dilemma of having had her father as her analyst. She could deal with someone who shared her difficulties—as her father and Lou did not. ‘With me,’ she had tried to explain to Frau Lou, ‘everything became so problematic because of two basic faults: from a discontent or insatiability with myself that makes me look for affection from others, and then from actually sticking with the others once I’ve found them. [The first] is just what you and Papa cannot understand.’ Once Eitingon had accepted her confession—and, tacitly, the role she had cast him in—she felt free to tell him in detail about Dorothy Burlingham. ‘Being together with Mrs. Burlingham is a great joy for me, and I am very happy that you also have such a good impression of her,’ she wrote to Eitingon after his first meeting with her friend. ‘I am often very sorry that she is not in analysis with you,’ said Anna Freud, who might have been speaking of herself. ‘This is not being very nice towards Reik. I think he has helped her a great deal. But still she would have received something with you which he probably cannot give, and which she certainly seeks.'”

Dorothy had a similar profile to Anna. Both were the youngest children in their respective families, and had difficult relationships with their father. Dorothy’s father was “severe and demanding with his children. His artistic talent had obviously impressed his children—and Dorothy identified with it, fostering it in her own children—but his domineering manner and his drinking had been much more influential. Dorothy’s mother, Tiffany’s second wife, had died when her youngest daughter was thirteen. She had been a model of intelligent, liberal—quite feminist—concern, but she had also been depressed during Dorothy’s childhood by the loss of another girl, two years Dorothy’s senior, to scarlet fever. As a child, Dorothy had felt, as Anna Freud had, like an unwanted hanger-on in her household, a little one who was a bore and a nuisance to the older ones.”

According to The Last Tiffany, written by Dorothy’s grandson Michael John Burlingham, Dorothy married a partner who had some signs of having periodic nervous breakdowns, but discounted the problem when questioned about it. The characteristic “rising euphoria followed by a crashing depression” was unique to manic depression, or bipolar disorder, and wasn’t so easily contained in those days. The complications continued with Dorothy’s first son, Robert Jr., who was very sensitive, asthmatic, and behaved like an emotional barometer for his mother. When he became reactive, it was often a signal that Dorothy used to notice any arising negativity in her mind state, which usually was affected by her husband’s depressions. His reactivity was connected to the family tendency to strain to control emotion with reaction formations to appear less emotional as a social mask. For example, Robert Sr.’s father Charles could breakdown emotionally when he thought no one was watching. Along with Robert Sr.’s reactions towards his father’s illnesses, he was also undergoing medical school pressures.

Dorothy also grew up in a family where “[she] knew only what her mother had practiced on her: assigning the young child to the supervision of a good nanny or nursemaid until time came for the mother to address the finer task of character formation and good breeding. The mother’s first crucial duty, in both Dorothy’s and Louie’s view, [Bob Sr.’s mother], was in selecting the right person for the job. Given Dorothy’s bitter memory of psychological mistreatment at the hands of her own nanny, she must have been especially sensitive to the issue. In another day and time, Dorothy might have related Bob’s asthma attack to separation anxiety. But, accepting her doctor’s counsel, instead of giving him the security he desperately needed, she continued to leave him with surrogates. She would regret this ‘wrong handling’ of him for the rest of her life. Bob’s asthmatic reactions occurred each and every time she left him, the infant crying, coughing, clinging, gasping for breath. Dorothy always made a point of calling home and was invariably assured that Bob had quieted down. She had reason to believe that she was doing the right thing.”

The mother and father-in-law could hear Bob Jr.’s screams and their story was that the nanny locked him in the closet when he reacted emotionally to the separations with his mother. They fired the nanny against Dorothy’s authority. The mother-in-law, Louie, was already critical of Dorothy, as nothing could be good enough for her son and grandson, and that’s why the in-laws lived across the street to monitor the situation. Dorothy was mistrustful of Louie and didn’t believe the story of a sadistic nanny, and so she gave a letter of reference for her, which the in-laws found appalling. Regardless of the situation, Dorothy felt it was a mistake to parent with surrogates. In the early part of the 20th century, there were debates on how much affection to give children, and Louie disagreed with behaviorist John Watson and Sigmund Freud. Both commented on the dangers of having too strong an attachment with children, but like in many cases one could go too far one way or another, and maybe Dorothy was more on the neglecting side of things.

The separation between father and son became exasperated when the U.S. entered the First World War and Robert Sr. joined as a doctor for the military. Even when this was a successful project for the father, his return and the birth of a daughter Katrina, nicknamed “Tinky,” and a subsequent pregnancy with Michael “Mikey,” Dorothy “knew the marriage was impossible. Before the birth of Michael, Dorothy had left Robert. ‘Somehow,’ she wrote, ‘I could not manage caring for him and doing what I should do for the children.’ When manic, [Robert Sr.] tended to verbal abuse, rashly charging into situations, confronting people unnecessarily. Then he plunged into an abysmal depression steeped in self-recrimination, blaming himself for his lack of control, and especially for dishonoring his family. Tragically, he seemed to believe, [like his father], that these episodes should have been controllable by the force of his will…Robert the doctor had become Robert the patient, husband had merged into father, savior into tyrant—this last [image] the very image that Dorothy had meant to leave behind. Confronted with what must have seemed like another tragic twist of fate, Dorothy was probably beset by old childhood fears. And so one cannot simply rationalize her decision as being in Bob’s interest, since, as she later recalled, ‘the separation made his childhood very difficult for he loved his father as well as myself, so when his father and I lived apart he had all kinds of problems which I could not seem to help him with.'”

Lou Andreas-Salomé Pt. 9: https://rumble.com/v5uq6vh-lou-andreas-salom-pt.-9.html

Lou Andreas-Salomé Pt. 5: https://rumble.com/v5lk7uh-lou-andreas-salom-pt.-5.html

Object Relations: Otto Rank Pt. 1: https://rumble.com/v1gvrq9-object-relations-otto-rank-pt.-1.html

As Dorothy moved around and sought out people interested in psychology, she eventually connected with Americans into psychoanalysis. “Dorothy had ‘some kind of analytic experience’ in Connecticut before she decided on settling in Europe.” She may have learned of the influence of having a father but no mother and now she went in the opposite direction with her kids. She had to fix the imbalance. “Her eldest child, Bob, was ‘angry at Dorothy for separating him from his father,’ and the boy ‘had become unmanageable.’ In the meantime, Dorothy’s husband’s illness had ‘forced him to give up his private practice, a humiliation that he never truly got over.’ He began a new career in medical research, ‘which, unlike the art of surgery, could be structured around his breakdowns. Loyal friends and relations rallied to him, taking him in while he recovered from depression.’ Knowing how devastating her departure from America would be for her husband, Dorothy ‘left without telling him.’ Like her autocratic father, Dorothy now made a selfish choice and found in psychoanalysis a new form of morality that could be used to justify her decision. She later claimed that her ‘reason for going to Vienna was entirely because of’ her eldest son, Bob.”

After visiting the International Psychoanalytic Congress, Dorothy decided on the modality after some encouragement. “I heard that analysis was good—so there I was.” The details of the meeting between Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham are not known, but “Anna Freud arranged to take Bob into analysis and for Dorothy herself to be analyzed by Theodor Reik; almost immediately, Anna also took into analysis Dorothy’s next oldest child, Mabbie. These were the beginnings of child analysis, about which Freud said he knew little. As he put it in a letter at the time to a relative in England, ‘Anna is treating naughty American children.'” Anna’s fateful meeting with her best friend, and the resolution of her transference, had begun.

Anna also collected another friend with twin-like characteristics, who was Eva Rosenfeld. She had four children, but two boys died in a diphtheria epidemic and a teenage daughter in a hiking accident. “When they became friends, Anna offered Eva solace as she mourned the loss of her daughter and she got in return Eva’s warm sympathy for the suffering her father’s illness and pain brought her. Eva understood what each visit to Tegel sanatorium for surgery on her father’s jaw did to Anna Freud: ‘I have headaches now very often, almost every day, and I somehow never get over the fear that something could turn out badly.’ She confided to Eva that when her father was being treated she was cast back into her adolescent condition, before her analysis: ‘These two weeks I have lived as I did in the time before I became an analyst and before you and Dorothy knew me, with the poetry of Rilke and daydreams and weaving. That, too, is an Anna, but without any Interpreter.’ Like Anna Freud, Eva Rosenfeld needed children, and Anna convinced her to start up a little pensione or temporary foster-care home for several child analytic patients who needed a period of separation from their parents.” The intermeshing of these step families through mutual sympathy began in a straightforward way of trying to fill Anna’s emptiness. “There is not a lot to say about me; it is already in what I have told you, in Eva’s child and Dorothy’s house. Both of these things belong to me, even if sometimes I feel I must go away for them instead of coming home to them.” Anna helped Dorothy set up a new apartment in the Freud family building, and provided consulting help for Eva about her remaining child Victor and her husband Walter.

Whatever reservations that Freud had about his daughter’s new relationships, he didn’t prevent the Burlinghams from moving into the building. “Freud noted the result in a January 1929 letter: ‘Our symbiosis with an American family (husbandless), whose children my daughter is bringing up analytically with a firm hand, is growing continually stronger, so that we share with them our needs for the summer.'” Anna’s ability to merge and empathize with her friends extended far and wide. “The friendship with Eva Rosenfeld grew deeper, and Anna Freud characterized the altruistic surrender in it as a kind of twinship. As she said to Eva in a letter: ‘You are me and I am you and everything of mine that you could use you should take, because it is rightfully yours.’ Eva realized that Anna’s friendship with Dorothy was becoming the most important of her relationships and felt some jealousy about it. But she also formed a friendship with Dorothy herself, and later offered her back garden as the location for a little schoolhouse equipped and staffed for the education of [Dorothy’s] own children, Eva’s son, and several of the children who boarded in Eva’s home.”

Sigmund Freud began a training analysis at this time for Dorothy Burlingham which was more forthcoming about her friendship with Anna than Anna outwardly told him. Young-Bruehl stayed in line with Sigmund Freud’s lack of concern for her daughter’s object-choices, which pointed to an austerity as opposed to an overt lesbianism. “While [Freud] praised his daughter’s intellectual and professional achievements, [he] was not untroubled by the course her life took. He had written to Lou Andreas-Salome in 1935: ‘she is truly independent of me; at the most I serve as a catalyst. You will enjoy reading her most recent writings. Of course there are certain worries; she takes things too seriously. What will she do when she has lost me? Will she lead a life of ascetic austerity?’ Anna Freud came to trust that her friendship was for her friend—as Dorothy later told her—’the most precious relationship [Dorothy] ever had.’ She did not have to compete for Dorothy’s love after she had won it. Many in her psychoanalytic circles, who knew enough to discount the persistent rumor that the friends were lesbians, but who realized that Anna Freud’s life partnership was chaste and her ‘family’ surrogate, found her situation poignant or sad…Anna did find her way to having her own desires rather than displacing them onto others and living vicariously; after her fashion, she had a rich and full family life, though she did not, in the 1920s or afterward, have a sexual relationship, with Dorothy Burlingham or with anyone else…She remained a ‘vestal’—to use the apt word Marie Bonaparte later chose to signal both Anna Freud’s virginity and her role as the chief keeper of her father’s person and his science, psychoanalysis.’ [Anna] felt she had [resolved her transference], and avoided the fate that Rilke had etched in a stanza of his Autumn Day, a poem that she knew by heart for all her life.”

Who has no house now will not have one.
Who is now alone will so remain:
sitting, reading, writing long letters;
restlessly wandering the avenues,
back and forth, while brown leaves blow.

Anna’s transference against her mother, aunt, and Sophie were resolved with Dorothy, and partially through Eva Rosenfeld. Her executive skills could be in the father’s place and receive feminine respect she didn’t receive from her family while she could connect with the next generation without having her own biological children. Through complementariness, the role of friendship could symbolically replace actual families by the similar caretaking activities involved. “The mother whose son Anna Freud had come to think of as her adopted son; they could be loved altruistically and from them she could receive maternal love and sisterly appreciation. As Dorothy Burlingham became more and more important, Anna Freud could oversee and altruistically support Dorothy’s interests in men, as long as these remained Platonic and did not threaten their friendship. But she seems also to have found in her friend a version of the youngest child in need of a perfect father and angry toward a distracted, overburdened mother that she knew in herself. They mirrored each other…Their relationship was ultimately like a twinship based on mutual identification; each infused the other in positive ways…There is no evidence that Anna Freud ever felt unfulfilled or regretful in her new family, although maintaining for the Burlingham children the dual role of stepparent and psychoanalyst was always problematic—for her and for them.”

There are many views on Anna Freud’s sexual orientation, and most people tend to take the view that identifies with themselves and project it on to her, when in truth you need contemporaneous people who witnessed a primal scene of some kind, which has not been unearthed as of yet. “For twenty-eight years they lived together much like a married couple, an arrangement which logically caused some speculation. The true nature of their relationship is, according to Victor Ross, ‘the question that everyone wants to know,’ and opinion on the subject is divided. Some, like Tinky and W. Ernest Freud, find the idea of a lesbian relationship between her mother and his aunt ridiculous. Others, particularly the generation of Dorothy’s grandchildren, think it a possibility, or even likely. The question had, however, originated within the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society itself. In response to a request for information, Dr. Richard Sterba wrote, ‘The relationship between [Dorothy] and Anna was obviously a very close one. Max Schur took my wife and me once in his car to Hochroterd in the Vienna Woods, where Anna and Mrs. Burlingham owned a little house together. He showed us the inside and we were astonished to find only one double bed in the only bedroom of the house.’ There was, in reality, a separate wing for the children, and for Dorothy and Anna two single beds in one room which they had evidently, the previous evening, pushed together; but to what purpose? The body of evidence makes it seem profoundly unlikely that they were lesbians in the sexual sense of the word: Anna’s asceticism and Dorothy’s program of sublimation certainly argue against it, as does Anna’s concern for Bob’s heterosexuality. It would have taken a hypocrite to discourage homosexuality in him while reveling in it herself; and Anna Freud was not hypocritical. One accurate description of Dorothy’s and Anna’s relationship, perhaps, is that offered by Peter Heller’s father, John. He calls them ‘intellectual lesbians,’ an oxymoron which may nevertheless describe a relationship between two women whose attraction for one another is primary, and limited only in its sexual expression.”

Most people would say that Anna’s need to masturbate could include someone else to help her out, but that could also be done in private, and possibly over time, and with age, become less of an explosive impulse. The way sublimation really works is as described in her paper in the prior episode, where the activities that take the place of sexuality are so meaningful and interesting that one is not in a state of sexual arousal because the pleasure and interest is preoccupied. Yet, her paper mentioned that when one is tired or if the craving is too strong for the ego, the catastrophizing dreams would return and a desire for masturbation. Most people would find it unlikely that Anna’s entire life would be so eventful that a desire for an orgasm would never arise. What is more likely, if there was a sexual relationship, is that it wasn’t the main part of her attraction to Dorothy, who was also once in a heterosexual relationship and birthed children of her own. Historian Paul Roazen’s impression of Dorothy “gave off the appearance of a nun-like chastity.”

Regardless, artists, and people who need to identify with role models just posit the conclusion, by cherry picking facts, without providing convincing evidence that would settle the debate. Until there are definitive letters that surface with witnesses or confessions from the said persons, like with Tchaikovsky, it remains in the open. With Tchaikovsky, his exclusive homosexuality was so hard to repress he was constantly looking for other exclusive homosexuals, bisexuals, queers or even heterosexuals who were flattered by the homosexual attention he provided them. “And here I burst I made a full confession of love, begging him not to be angry, not to feel constrained if I bored him, etc. All these confessions were met with a thousand various small caresses, strokes on the shoulder, cheeks, and strokes across my head. I am incapable of expressing to you the full degree of bliss that I experienced by fully giving myself away.” Family members originally censored his letters, and later on Soviets under the belief of Soviet Realism, thought only bourgeois societies would have homosexuality. After Glasnost, the unredacted letters emerged. Dorothy on the other hand wrote of an alternative type of love attention that attracted this kind of couple, which was a twinship relationship that resembled what in the past were called Boston Marriages.

Freud’s Last Session (Lesbian Movie Trailer): https://youtu.be/2n6ggXuSibc?si=HSMw3MeRM1YtaoZ0

Was Anna Freud a lesbian? – Laura Smith: https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/was-anna-freud-lesbian

Withnail and I – “Do you like vegetables?”: https://youtu.be/mPRgi448XfU?si=dnyo35mBWUwxE1nn

Mossop, H. (2024), Was Anna Freud a ‘friend of Dorothy’? A queer phenomenological historiography of Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham’s personal and professional relationship. British Journal of Psychotherapy.

After all her running away from her husband and the in-laws, Dorothy found an option that allowed for her preferred method of raising children, and she didn’t have to do it all by herself. Boston marriages allowed women, who primarily wanted to focus on a vocation, the chance to partner up with another woman, to prevent the predictable results of a common heterosexual marriage situation and how it would relegate professional goals to the backburner for women. “A common daydream which in spite of its frequency has received very little attention is the fantasy of possessing a twin. It is a conscious fantasy, built up in the latency period as the result of disappointment by the parents in the oedipus situation, in the child’s search for a partner who will give him all the attention, love and companionship he desires and who will provide an escape from loneliness and solitude…The same emotional conditions are the basis for the so-called family romance. In that well-known daydream the child in the latency period develops fantasies of having a better, kinder and worthier family than his own, which has so bitterly disappointed and disillusioned him. The parents have been unable to gratify the child’s instinctual wishes; in disappointment his love turns into hate; he now despises his family and, in revenge, turns from it. He has death-wishes against the former love-objects, and as a result feels alone and forsaken in the world. This is a situation the child cannot endure; he seeks a way out of his loneliness and finds solace in a daydream. He creates a new family in imagination and builds up a wonderful life around these new imaginary parents who fulfil the wishes (though not the crudely sexual ones) that were denied by the real parents.” Parents can only provide so much guidance and wisdom, because they can never be the stockpile of all wisdom found in the world, so children eventually have to look to fill out their relationships in the outer world with willing participants who want to trade appreciation with each other that they were both lacking in their respective families. This is why the ongoing debates about identities and sexual orientation tend towards narcissism and really should focus more on finding stable and authentic sources of love, in all of its varieties.

Anna Freud: A Biography – Elisabeth Young-Bruehl: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780300140231/