ELISABETH YOUNG-BRUEHL
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dedicate herself to her father and to psychoanalysis. For Frau Lou's
sanction, Anna Freud was deeply grateful, because, as she told her
in December of 1924, without it she "would have been made insecure
by those who feared for my future and would have liked to send me
away from [home]." These unnamed people did not know, she said,
that" ... I, without any [plans for the] future, have so much here,
more than many people get altogether, in a whole life." Frau Lou
understood this kind of self-surrendering dedication; she even had
extolled it as the quintessence of feminine love. On the other hand,
as an exemplary figure Lou represented an important synthetic pos–
sibility: she was a "purely feminine" type, but also an intellectual , a
thinker and a writer with a "masculine" (in her own terms) bent for
sweeping syntheses, bold conjectures, poetic leaps .
...
...
...
Lou Andreas-Salome's attitude toward Anna Freud's
asceticism raises the question that would be obvious to anyone who
considered the complexities of a father's analysis of his own
daughter. Freud himself counted the analysis a success . In a well–
known letter that he wrote in 1935 to Edoardo Weiss, who was con–
templating analyzing his son, Freud remarked: "Concerning the
analysis of your hopeful son, that is certainly a ticklish business .
With a younger , promising brother it might be done more easily.
With [my] own daughter I succeeded well . There are special doubts
and difficulties with a son." Having issued this warning, Freud said
that he had no right to forbid Weiss the trial- but Weiss decided
against it.
Even in 1935 , the psychoanalytic community was not as con–
cerned as it later became with regulating analytic work-with stipu–
lating, for example, that analysts refrain from analyzing not just
family members but friends and associates. When the psychoana–
lytic community was very small, analyses that crossed family and
friendship lines were common, and the demands upon analytic dis–
cretion were thus very great. But even given the unregulated state of
psychoanalysis, it is obvious that Freud and his circle consistently
saw less difficulty for women than for men - for daughters than for
sons - in extra-analytic closeness . Freud himself, for examples ,
analyzed both of his friend Oscar Rie's daughters, Margarethe and
Marianne, his friend Sandor Ferenczi's future stepdaughter, and his
friend Anton von Freud's sister Kata Levy . Before the First World
War, both Carl Jung and Karl Abraham had worked analytically
