Test of time

Abstract

It is now almost half a century since Anna Freud published Normality and Pathology in Childhood. The book summed up many of the ideas she had developed in the years following her migration to Britain in 1938, and set out a blueprint for the work she did in the following 15 years of her life, up until her death in 1982. I first read the book (for reasons that I won’t go into here) when I was an undergraduate at university studying English Literature, long before I had developed any interest in (or real knowledge of) child psychology or psychoanalysis. At the time I was steeped in continental and post-structuralist philosophy, and in comparison to Sigmund Freud’s rich and multi-layered writing, which I’d already begun to read, I found his daughter’s style to be rather too plain and common-sensical for my liking. As someone going through late adolescence/young adulthood myself, I think I reacted against the apparent assumption she makes in the book that there is such a thing as “normal” development, against which each of us could be assessed; and I found some of the language rather oldfashioned and conservative (such as her off-hand remark that a large number of “delinquents and criminals”, when assessed psychologically, “are found to be of primitive, infantile mentality, retarded, deficient, defective, with low intelligence quotients”, p.178). Perhaps the aspect of the work that I liked best at the time was the apparently throw-away remarks she made about various aspects of childhood. One that stuck in my memory, long after I read the book, was a comment she makes that a “school boy’s favourite position on the football field betrays something of his intimate relations to his contemporaries in the symbolic language of attack [and] defence” (p.20)—a view which, as a left-back myself, I gradually came to see was all too true. Inevitably I returned to Anna Freud’s book a number of years later, when I began to train as a child psychotherapist at the Centre re-named in her honour (the Anna Freud Centre had been called the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic while she was alive), and this time I found that it offered a great deal of practical insight into working as a child psychotherapist. However my earlier encounter with the book made me somewhat reluctant to engage with it fully, and at the time I found my attention taken more by some of the other psychoanalytic writing I was encountering, such as the work of Fairbairn (1952), Winnicott (1947) or Shengold (1989), which seemed to speak much