ELISABETH YOUNG-BRUEHL
589
Freud was aware, as a father, that he had difficulty in their
day-to-day lives realizing how much he wanted his daughter to stay
always at home, as his youngest sister Dolfi had with their parents .
This was so even though he could, when he focused his attention on
their dilemma, state it clearly from his own point of view: "Anna is in
excellent shape," he told Eitingon in 1921, "she is gay, industrious
and inspired. I would like just as well to keep her at home as to know
her in a home of her own - if it would only be the same for her!"
Similarly, to Lou:
I too very much miss Daughter-Anna . She set off for Berlin and
Hamburg on March the 2nd . I have long felt sorry for her for
still being at home with us old folks [ . . .
1,
but on the other
hand, if she really were to go away I should feel myself as de–
prived as I do now, and as I should do if I had to give up smok–
ing! As long as we are all together, one doesn't realize it clearly,
or at least we do not. And therefore in view of all these insoluble
conflicts it is good that life comes to an end sometime or another.
In this remark, Freud indicated that the "solution" to their insoluble
conflicts would be, precisely, his death . He was, in a sense , addicted
to her staying at home, to her presence, as he was to his cigars; he
himself had analyzed very astutely the psychic level at which the
pleasure of smoking and the pleasure of female adoration coin–
cided - the level at which an adult remains, as it were, at the mater–
nal breast. Freud had forecast what he told Lou Andreas Salome
very clearly in his essay of a decade earlier, "The Theme of the
Three Caskets": " ... the doomed man is not willing to renounce
the love of women; he insists on hearing how much he is loved.. ..
But it is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of women as he
had it first from his mother."
• •
•
Their analytic work did not loosen the tie between father
and daughter. But it was only what they called "a piece of fate" that
sealed them in their closeness after the analysis had stopped in the
spring of 1922.
In April of 1923 Anna Freud was busy with her first child pa–
tients and consultations, when her father went into a Vienna clinic
as an outpatient, scheduled to have a growth removed from his right
