Review by Choice Review
Historian and psychoanalyst Elizabeth Young-Bruehl (Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, Columbia Univ.) offers here a new edition of her definitive biography of psychoanalytic thinker Anna Freud (first published, 1988). This edition offers a new introductory essay on the "Freud wars" of the 1990s, in order to situate the new attention paid to the work of Anna Freud, who survived the aforementioned wars just fine. The biography itself is unchanged, although the bibliographic materials have been updated. Arguably, the biography is so thoroughly researched and carefully presented that any modifications are unnecessary. This book is still, after 20 years, the gold standard of biographies of thinkers in the psychoanalytic tradition and thus continues to merit a place among the best. These include Elizabeth Roudinesco's Jacques Lacan (Eng. tr., 1997) and Linda Hopkins's False Self (2006), a biography of Masud Khan, an associate of Anna Freud's. Libraries that do not own the previous edition or wish to have the most up-to-date edition will want this volume, which is required reading for those interested in the history of psychological thought and practice and in mental health. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. M. Uebel University of Texas
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
