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ELISABETH YOUNG-BRUEHL
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was susceptible to regression and her intellectual energies to inhibi–
tion_ But his joy was also in proportion to his anxiety _When he had
learned that she planned to prepare and deliver a membership
paper, the founder of psychoanalysis and the president of the Vienna
Society compared himself to Lucius Junius Brutus, the legendary
founder of the Roman Republic and the chiefjudge in its first tribu–
nals. "I will try to arrange for the lecture at tonight's meeting," he
wrote to Max Eitingon. "Then, on Wednesday the 31st of this
month, I will feel like Junius Brutus the elder when he had to judge
his own son. Perhaps she is going to make a decisive step."
Junius Brutus's son-so the legend has it-was executed after
his father had ruled against him in the Roman tribunal. Things went
rather differently at Anna Freud's trial. She spoke from notes, lu–
cidly and authoritatively, and was well received, if a little enviously.
But one of Freud's colleagues induced a momentary panic by sug–
gesting that the girl she had written about was "a totally abnormal
person whose incompetence and inferiority would absolutely emerge
in real life." Anna Freud was shocked into silence, but her father
came to her rescue: "Fortunately Papa answered him and defended
my little girl." The evening thus turned into a "nice story" of redemp–
tion by the father even while it was a success for the daughter.
Anna Freud and her father both associated her decisive career
step with her masculinity, however, so they could never be unam–
bivalently pleased. The price of her success as a sublimator was her
continued asceticism. In her life, she stood where both she and her
father had left their female patients at the ends of their respective es–
says-that is, at the point of escape from the erotic side of life, from
femininity. As she put the matter: "The sublimation of [the girl's
1
sensual love [for her father
1
into tender friendship is of course greatly
facilitated by the fact that already in the early stages of the beating
fantasy the girl abandoned the differences of the sexes and is in–
variably represented as a boy." Both the writing of stories and the
achievement of tender friendship with her father were linked to this
abandoning of the differences of the sexes and the consequent asce–
ticism. For Freud, however, asceticism did not have to be the final
result: " ... the beating fantasy and other analogous perverse fixa–
tions would also be only precipitations of the Oedipus complex,
scars, so to say, left behind after the process has ended, just as the
notorious 'sense of inferiority' corresponds to a narcissistic scar of the
same sort." Anna Freud's paper, on the other hand, ended without
any hopeful anticipation of the form her patient's sexual life might
