Anna Freud as a historian of psychoanalysis

This article explores a series of papers Anna Freud wrote in the 1970s, which constitute her history of child psychoanalysis. It notes her purposes-theoretical, clinical, and institutional-for reviewing this history and then focuses on three themes that she stressed. First, she emphasized that the "widening scope of psychoanalysis" had been both tremendously fruitful and perplexing as it revealed areas-such as the developmental pathologies-for which theory and technique lag. Second, she underscored the way child analysis had been extended from pathology to the theory of normal development, particularly by adding child observation to its research methods. Third, she noted how child analysis has often been hampered by reductionist thinking, and she made a plea for complexity: for considering all metapsychological frameworks and all developmental lines, and for articulating a complexly grounded diagnostic.