ELISABETH YOUNG-BRUEHL
Aile Dingen, an die ich mich gebe,
werden reich und geben mich aus.
I have no beloved or place for home,
no circle where I am at center.
The things to which I give myself
grow rich-while I'm impoverished.
595
The chief exemplar of "altruistic surrender" in
The
Ego and
the
Mechanisms of Defense
is a governess who has lived an uneventful life
entirely dedicated to other people's needs: "She lived in the lives of
other people, instead of having any experiences of her own ." This
woman, Anna Freud wrote:
. . . displaced her ambitious fantasies onto her men friends and
her libidinal wishes onto her women friends . The former suc–
ceeded to her affection for her father and her big brother, both of
whom had been the object of her penis envy, while the latter rep–
resented the sister upon whom, at a rather later period of child–
hood, the envy was displaced in the form of envy of her beauty.
The patient felt that the fact that she was a girl prevented her
from achieving her ambitions and, at the same time, that she was
not even a pretty enough girl really to be attractive to men. In
her disappointment with herself she displaced her wishes onto
objects who she felt were better qualified to fulfIll them.
In her portrait of the governess, Anna Freud combined her in–
sights into the origins ofjealousy and sibling rivalry with her medita–
tions on "overgoodness." Her remarkably clear and simple descrip–
tion shows her developed ability to step back reflectively and
theoretically from the kind of self-understanding she had reached in
1925. Then she had been able to combine her two analytic themes,
but not to present the combination theoretically.
For example, she had reacted with a self-portrait to a short
story Lou Andreas-Salome had written after hearing Freud's "Some
Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the
Sexes" on the Semmering vacation in 1925 . She, her father, and
Frau Lou were all in search of the mechanisms of female jealousy
toward women and envy of men:
. . . your Mathilde is good as a woman and has a right to
be
glad
that she is .
If
one can dance as she does, then it makes sense . But
if one looks like Dina, or like me, one only feels envy-in two
directions: the one that shows how one might
be
achieving like a
