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with their young daughters and written essays based on their obser–
vations. Freud's assumption at the time of his daughter's analysis
was that boys would -like "Little Hans" - feel hostile and rivalrous
toward a father-analyst but girls, who were not in competition for
the mother, would not.
Practical considerations certainly weighed most heavily in the
arrangement. Freud did not trust his Vienna colleagues, and those
he did trust lived too far away, in Budapest and Berlin. When Oliver
Freud , the middle of the Freud sons, needed analysis in 1921, Franz
Alexander of Berlin was his choice, and this analysis for an obses–
sional neurosis was both successful and apparently no threat to the
Freud family privacy. The family financial situation in the fall of
1918 also argued for treatment at home, as did the fact that Freud
had few patients - and more time - in the unsettled postwar months.
But in Freud's statement to Edoardo Weiss, the emphasis is
upon the relatively unproblematic nature of a father's analysis of his
daughter . He started off, at least, in a completely confident frame of
mind : "Anna's analysis will be very elegant," he told Ferenczi. But
Freud was certainly aware that his daughter's adoration of him was
not an unproblematic affair. He knew the extent of her idealization
of him, and he revealed it-sometimes in jest and sometimes som–
berly-in his letters . In November of 1919, when Max Eitingon sent
Freud a sum of money to tide him over during the continuing finan–
cial difficulties, Freud wrote him a description of how the Freud
family had reacted to the letter announcing this largesse: -"As I was
busy with four analyses in the morning, I had no time to think about
it, and read the letter out loud at luncheon during which, apart from
my wife, three sons and our young daughter (whom you know) were
present. It had a strange effect: the three boys seemed satisfied, but
the two women were up in arms and my daughter declared-evi–
dently she cannot stand the demolition of her father complex - that
as a punishment
(!)
she wouldn't go to Berlin for Christmas." But
there is a fateful formula in her reaction: feeling that her father was
diminished or made less than completely magnificent by his lack of
funds, she declared that she would stay at home . Staying at home
and leaving home had been for years the crucial possibilities in the
father-daughter relationship, and they became bound up with the
most problematic dimensions of the analytic relationship: the nature
of resistance in it, and the manner of resolving the transference,
leaving the analyst.
