ANNA FREUD
Anna Freud (1895–1982), the youngest of Freud’s six children, was born on December 3 in the same year that Breuer and Freud published Studies on Hysteria, marking the founding of psychoanalysis. According to Young-Bruehl, “To Anna Freud’s reckoning, she and psychoanalysis were twins who started out life competing for their father’s attention” (1988, p. 15). As a young child, Anna began describing her dreams to her father, and several of them were included in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900/1953). At the age of 13 or 14, Anna was allowed to attend the Wednesday meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society by sitting on a library ladder in the corner of the room. By the time she was 17, Anna had read some of her father’s books and often discussed with him the meaning of psychoanalytic terms. Although Anna became a successful primary school teacher, her interest in psychoanalysis intensified and, contrary to his own sanction against analysts analyzing their own friends or family members, Freud began to psychoanalyze Anna in 1918. The analysis continued until 1922 and was resumed for another year in 1925. In 1922 Anna presented a paper to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on childhood fantasies (presumably her own), and two weeks later she was certified as a psychoanalyst.