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PARTISAN REVIEW
the Vienna Society , despite the hypercriticalness she expected from
her father's sharp-tongued, competitive colleagues. The fact that she
did so in five weeks, for delivery on May 31st , makes it almost cer–
tain that the patient whose case is discussed was herself-the one pa–
tient she knew intimately.
In Sigmund Freud's "A Child Is Being Beaten," the 1919 essay
which was Anna Freud's starting point for "Beating Fantasies and
Daydreams," six cases are mentioned, two males and four females .
He gave brief notes about five of these cases : three were obsessional
neurotics of varying degrees of severity; one was an hysteric; the
fifth "had come to be analyzed merely on account of indecisiveness in
life, [and] would not have been classified at all by coarse clinical
diagnosis, or would have been dismissed as 'psychasthenic.'" This
fifth patient sounds very much like Anna Freud, who was trying in
1919 to decide whether to be a psychoanalytically informed teacher
or a psychoanalyst.
In the three parts of her essay, Anna Freud presented three
stages in the development of her subject's beating fantasy . The first
was the creation of the beating fantasy, which was itself a substitute
for an incestuous father-daughter love scene that "distorted by
repression and regression to the anal-sadistic phase finds expression
as a beating scene," the climax of which coincided with masturbatory
gratification. These fantasies appeared before the girl entered
school, between her fifth and sixth years, and they continued un–
til- between her eighth and tenth years - they were replaced by
what she called "nice stories." The "nice stories" seemed to the girl to
have no connection with the beating fantasies , though she did admit
to her analyst that the beating fantasies occasionally rose up to inter–
rupt the "nice stories" and that she then punished herself by tem–
porarily renouncing the "nice stories ."
The analyst pointed out to the girl that the beating fantasies
and the nice stories had a similar structure. The nice stories in–
variably opened with a weak young man committing an infraction
and being put at the mercy of a strong older man. In scenes of in–
creasing tension, the young man is threatened with punishments un–
til he is, finally, pardoned in a scene of reconciliation and harmony .
In the beating fantasy , too [Anna Freud wrote
1,
the protagonists
are strong and weak persons who , in the clearest delineation , op–
pose each other as adults and children. There , too , it is regularly
a matter of a misdeed, even though the latter is left as indefinite
