Volume 35, Number 18 · November 24, 1988
Freud's Cordelia
By Michael Ignatieff
Anna Freud: A Biography
by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
Summit Books, 527 pp., $24.95
My Three Mothers and Other Passions
by Sophie Freud
New York University Press, 351 pp., $27.95
She was his dutiful daughter, his Antigone, the one who found her destiny in safeguarding the shrine of his achievement. Melanie Klein and the Kleinians believed that having been analyzed by her father, she never escaped the Oedipal thrall. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's splendidly intelligent biography makes a convincing case that she managed her escape, becoming both a theoretical innovator and a woman in her own right. It is an authorized biography, but thankfully free of the hagiographical pieties of the genre. Young-Bruehl, who has written a deservedly praised biography of Hannah Arendt, was allowed access to the four steamer trunks of meticulously filed memorabilia left behind at Maresfield Gardens upon Anna's death in 1982.
Review, 3239 words
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