Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud 1904 - 1938
Book Details
- Publisher : Polity Press
- Published : 2014
- Cover : Hardback
- Pages : 400
- Category :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 34732
- ISBN 13 : 9780745641492
- ISBN 10 : 0745641490
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This book is the first publication of the complete correspondence of Sigmund Freud with his daughter Anna. The correspondence ranges over personal and family matters - social events, family holidays, births and deaths, health issues, war experiences, etc. - as well as professional matters, including the progress of Sigmund Freud's and Anna Freud's scientific works, their views on students and colleagues, and the international dissemination and publication of psychoanalytical writings.
The letters provide valuable insight into the work and family life of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, including the changes in his perception of women that were triggered by his relationship with his daughter. They also shed fresh light on the development of Anna's life and career - the early years in England, the period of her analysis with her own father and the last phase of her father's illness and death, when Anna became the torch-bearer and protector of her father's works, and eventually became the leading figure in the International Psychoanalytic Association.
Richly annotated with editorial comments, this unique volume of correspondence between Sigmund and Anna Freud is an invaluable source of historical documentation about the formation and development of psychoanalysis and the early decades of the psychoanalytic movement.
About the Author(s)
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia; from 1860 until Hitler's invasion of Austria in 1938 he lived in Vienna. He was then forced to seek asylum in London, where he died the following year. He began his career as a doctor, specialising in work on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. He was almost thirty when his interests first turned to psychology, and during ten years of clinical work in Vienna he developed the practice of what he called ""psychoanalysis"". This began simply as a method of treating neurotic patients by investigating their minds, but it quickly grew into an investigation of the workings of the mind in general, both ill or healthy. Freud demonstrated the normal development of the sexual instinct in childhood and, largely on the basis of an examination of dreams, arrived at his fundamental discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday thoughts and actions. Freud's ideas have shaped not only many specialist disciplines, but have also influenced the entire intellectual climate of the last century.
Anna Freud, the youngest of Sigmund Freud's six children, and the only one to make her career in psychoanalysis, was born in Vienna on 3 December 1895. Starting her professional life as a schoolteacher, she became a member of the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society in 1922. She maintained a lifelong interest in education, and her extensive contributions in this field were matched by those in all aspects of family law, pediatrics, as well as psychoanalytic psychology, normal and abnormal. Her work in Vienna was brought to an end by the Nazi occupation and she found sanctuary in London with her parents in 1938. Her father died in the following year, but Anna Freud maintained the tradition he began in her work as a member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society and as the founder of the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic - now the Anna Freud Centre. Her services to psychoanalysis were recognized by the award of the CBE in 1967 and by a large number of honorary doctorates on both sides of the Atlantic, including as a gesture of reparation, an honorary MD from the University of Vienna. She died on 9 October 1982.
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