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PARTISAN REVIEW
will retreat into an identification with her father states in another
way the conclusion of "A Child Is Being Beaten," where Freud had
noted that the female takes a male role in her fantasies, relating to
her father in that way, and continues in the role as an ascetic or a
spectator at quasi-sexual scenes. His emphasis on jealousy as a con–
sequence of the "masculinity complex" restates the pro\:;lem that
Anna Freud left her subject with at the end of "Beating Fantasies and
Daydreams." The girl who, through sublimation, became a writer
was a person who needed praise as a reward for renouncing the mas–
turbation she had taken up in her transition from wishing for a penis
to wishing for a child . But the social activity of writing and the social
pleasure of praise are difficult to dissociate from the original mater–
nal and sibling rivalries.
About
Gutseins
(being good), the other topic of her renewed
analysis, Anna Freud eventually had a great deal to say in publica–
tions. But her published reflections had their origin in a shift that
came about during her renewed analysis. She marked the shift with
a 1924 letter to Lou Andreas-Salome: "The value of being good is
not as great as I thought for a long time. There has to be something
else involved, which alone makes being good valuable for other peo–
ple: perhaps it is to be without internal conflict, to be clear about
oneself, but also to be able to endure something." By this last capac–
ity, she meant, she said, "coming to terms with the inevitable harsh–
ness" of people and events and not escaping into saintly hopefulness
that all would turn out well in the end. At that time she thought that
Eitingon was an "effeminate" denier of harsh realities, and she also
found him lacking in insight about what she called his "overgood–
ness," a mechanism for negating "bad" desires that ended up,
nonetheless , negating itself and producing bad actions. She later
revised her view of Eitingon, but not of "overgoodness," which she
found in herself and gave the name "altruistic surrender."
One of the most intriguing chapters of Anna Freud's 1936
work,
The Ego and the Mechanisms
of
Defense,
is devoted to "altruistic
surrender." By that time, she understood overgoodness or altruistic
surrender as projection of forbidden or dangerous wishes onto other
people. Someone who thus disposes of wishes can take great pleasure
in promoting and supporting the fulfUlment of them by proxies but
may also feel as empty as that lonely figure Rilke described in one of
Anna Freud's favorite poems, "Der Dichter" ("The Poet"):
Ich habe keine Geliebte, kein Haus,
keine Stelle
auf
der ich Lebe.
