ELISABETH YOUNG-BRUEHL
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had won it. Many in her psychoanalytic circles who knew enough to
discount the persistent rumor that the friends were lesbians, but who
realized that Anna Freud's life partnership was chaste and her "fam–
ily" surrogate, found her situation poignant or sad_ She, on the other
hand, felt she had satisfied her
Etwas-Haben- Wollen
and avoided the
fate that Rilke had etched in a stanza of his poem, "Herbsttag"
("Autumn Day"), which she had by heart for all her life:
Wer Jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr,
Wer Jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Aileen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blatter treiben.
Who has no house now will not have one.
Who is now alone will so remain:
sitting, reading, writing long letters;
restlessly wandering the avenues,
back and forth, while brown leaves blow.
There is no evidence that Anna Freud ever felt unfulftlled or regret–
ful in her new family, although maintaining for the Burlingham chil–
dren the dual role of stepparent and psychoanalyst was always prob–
lematic - for her and for them.
In one of her most incisive and important clinical contribu–
tions, Anna Freud noted that sexuality repressed or denied can be
recovered symbolically or vicariously in a relationship of com–
plementarity. She made the point in a lecture on male homosexual–
ity, as she described a male patient's effort to recover his own split–
off masculinity in his male partner's virility. But this analytic
concept of complementarity is certainly applicable to relationships of
many sorts, whether overtly sexual or not. Dorothy Burlingham,
whose older sisters were twins, wrote touchingly about how siblings
of twins often invent a twin, a complementary self: "A further ele–
ment in many daydreams of having a twin is that of the imaginary
twin being a complement to the daydreamer. The latter endows his
twin with all the qualities and talents he misses in himself and
desires for himself. The twin thus represents an ideal of himself, his
superego." In later letters that they exchanged, Dorothy Burlingham
and Anna Freud agreed that they were each other's twins, or twins
for each other, in their "ideal friendship_" "I had such pleasure in
your letter about the identical twins ," Dorothy wrote. "It makes me
happy and proud that we have such a bond."
