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PARTISAN REVIEW
the most thought. But in addition to the transference, Anna Freud's
surviving correspondences, as well as the papers both she and her
father wrote in
1924
and
1925,
indicate that two other topics emerged
as central to the renewed analysis. One was the "masculinity com–
plex" and its precipitate, jealousy, and the other was "goodness," or,
as Anna Freud would later call it, "altruism."
* * *
Freud's illness brought about not just a deepening of the
bonds between father and daughter, but a "re-edition" of the old dif–
ficulties - the old jealous rivalry - that Anna Freud had had with her
mother. Martha Freud felt herself displaced, as, to a lesser extent,
did Tante Minna. With the combined stress of her husband's illness
and the death of her grandson, Martha Freud suffered through a
number of stomach problems and migraine headaches; Minna spent
the better part of a year in sanatoria with a heart condition. The day–
to-day consideration and civility that was always characteristic of the
household was not disturbed, but unhappy currents ran under it,
and there was competition between mother and daughter for the role
of chief nurse to Freud.
Feminine jealousy and rivalry were recurrent topics in Freud's
work in the years immediately following his major surgery, as they
were the topic of the first paper that Anna Freud delivered after her
renewed analysis in
1924-25.
Her brief communication to the Vienna
Society meeting in December of
1925
was called 'Jealousy and the
Desire for Masculinity," and it was based largely upon two analyses
she had conducted simultaneously, one of a girl and one of the
woman who resembled herself. The two analyses, she told Eitingon,
often ran parallel: " ... both struggle with the same problems, the
masculinity wish and envy of siblings, so similarly that often on the
same day they say the same things almost verbatim. I tell Papa
many such things."
These reports would have confirmed her Papa's own recently
revised view, which he arrived at during his daughter's second anal–
ysis. Although Freud had made important remarks on the topic of
jealousy in "The Economic Problem of Masochism"
(1924)
and "The
Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex"
(1924),
his main statement
came in a paper called "Some Psychical Consequences of the Ana–
tomical Distinction Between the Sexes," a piece he started early in
1925
and finished in August while his daughter and Lou Andreas–
Salome were with him on vacation to discuss it.
