584
PARTISAN REVIEW
The writing activity that Anna Freud described took her young
patient one step beyond two of the cases Freud had presented in "A
Child Is Being Beaten." He had noted:
.. . in two of my female cases an elaborate superstructure of
daydreams, which was of great significance for the life of the per–
son concerned, had grown up over the masochistic beating fan–
tasy. The function of this superstructure was to make possible a
feeling of satisfied excitation, even though the masturbatory act
was refrained from. In one of these cases, the content - being
beaten by the father - was allowed to venture again into con–
sciousness, so long as the subject's own ego was made unrecog–
nizable by a thin disguise.... In both the cases of daydream–
ing - one of which rose to the level of a work of
art -
the heroes
were always young men; indeed, women used not to corne into
these creations at all, and only made their first appearance after
many years, and then in minor parts .· ...
Freud described the "masculinity complex" in these two cases
and concluded that "when they turn away from their incestuous love
for their father, with its genital significance, they easily ahandon
their feminine role." Freud did not connect the female patients'
assumption of a masculine role in the fantasies and daydreams with
masculinized behavior or homosexuality. On the contrary, he saw it
as an escape from sexuality: " . . . the girl escapes from the demands
of the erotic side of her life altogether. She turns herself in fantasy
into a man, without herself becoming active in a masculine way, and
is no longer anything but a spectator at the event which has the place
of a sexual act." This much also was implied in Anna Freud's paper,
but she went on to show that the spectator who communicates, who
writes down what she understands, enjoys a form of pleasure - not
masturbatory pleasure, not sexual pleasure, but the social pleasure
of praise.
Insofar as it focused on beating fantasies and daydreaming as
inhibitors of work and career decisions, Anna Freud's analysis of
nearly four years - quite long by the then current standards - was a
successful one. By the terms she herself set, it allowed her to trans–
form fantasy activity and daydreaming into the social activity of
writing. Anna Freud's paper is both a study of sublimation and an
act of sublimation.
For her analyst and father, Anna Freud's paper was a source of
great pride, for he certainly knew the degree to which her fantasy life
