ELISABETH YOUNG-BRUEHL
597
one can live without being able to judge oneself, criticize what one
has accomplished, and still enjoy what one does, is unimaginable to
me_" She wanted Eitingon to understand that she was not, really,
referring to the high standard for self-reflection that Freud set and
that she accepted as a matter of course. What she had in mind was
rather different:
... what I have always wanted for myself, from the beginning,
without much change over time, is much more primitive, and it
can be said quite honestly. It is probably nothing more than the
affection of the people with whom I am in contact, and also their
good opinion of me.
It
is not just that I myself should say that
something [I have done] is good; there must be others who say
the same and confirm me . Now in a curiously self-evident way I
have always been able not to make such a demand on my pa–
tients; in dealing with them I have never felt such human needs .
Thus working has become remarkably easy for me in recent
years.
But, she told Eitingon, with the children she had in analysis at that
particular time, she did feel a very human need for more than good
analytic work.
The children who aroused these feelings were the eldest two of
Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham's four children, Bob, a boy of ten with
serious asthma, and Mabbie, a girl of eight. Dorothy Burlingham, a
New Yorker, had brought all four of her children to Vienna hoping
that psychoanalysis would help them deal with her separation from
their father, Robert Burlingham, and with the effects on them of his
manic-depressive syndrome. Dorothy Burlingham also sought anal–
ysis for herself, turning to Theodor Reik because she was too shy to
approach Sigmund Freud. The family shared quarters with another
American family, but they were otherwise strangers in Vienna, and
Anna Freud offered them a context and comfort as well as analysis.
Anna Freud told Eitingon that thoughts of Mabbie and Bob
Burlingham filled her mind. More than she wished, she had
"thoughts which go along with my work but do not have a proper
place in it." She put her problem simply: "I think sometimes that I
want not only to make them healthy but also, at the same time, to
have them, or at least have something of them, for myself. Tem–
porarily, of course, this desire is useful for my work, but sometime
or another it really will disturb them, and so, on the whole, I really
