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PARTISAN REVIEW
Dorothy Burlingham also attended seminars - including Anna
Freud's-at the Vienna Institute. Anna Freud's and Dorothy Bur–
lingham's growing friendship was revealed in an analysis to the father–
analyst - but not by his daughter.
Anna Freud did find her way to having her own desires rather
than displacing them onto others and living vicariously; after her
fashion, she had a rich and full family life, though she did not, in the
1920s or afterwards, have a sexual relationship, with Dorothy Bur–
lingham or with anyone else. She remained a "vestal" - to use the apt
word Marie Bonaparte later chose to signal both Anna Freud's
virginity and her role as the chief keeper of her father's person and
his science, psychoanalysis.
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While he praised his daughter.'s intellectual and professional
achievements, Sigmund Freud was not untroubled by the course her
life took. He had written to Lou Andreas-Salome in 1935: " ... she
is truly independent of me; at the most I serve as a catalyst. You will
enjoy reading her most recent writings. Of course there are certain
worries: she takes things too seriously. What will she do when she
has lost me? Will she lead a life of ascetic austerity?"
Anna Freud's life was ascetic, and her father's death, when it
came, brought no change. But "the erotic side of her life" - to use
Freud's phrase from "A Child Is Being Beaten"-was restored to her,
in a very particular sense: the femininity she had denied herself, in
herself, came to her in the person of her new friend. Dorothy Bur–
lingham also compensated for her troubled relations with her own
mother and Tante Minna and replaced her sister Sophie, the mother
whose oldest son, Ernst, Anna Freud had come to think of as her
own adopted son. Dorothy could be loved altruistically, and from
her Anna Freud could receive maternal love and sisterly apprecia–
tion. As Dorothy Burlingham became more and more important,
Anna Freud could also oversee and altruistically support Dorothy's
relationships with men, as long as these remained platonic and did
not threaten their friendship. But she seems, further, to have found
in her friend a version of the youngest child in need of a perfect
father and angry toward a distracted, overburdened mother whom
she knew in herself. They mirrored each other.
Anna Freud came to trust that her friendship was for her
friend - as Oorothy later told her - "the most precious relationship I
ever had." She did not have to compete for Dorothy's love after she
