Impious fidelity: Anna Freud, psychoanalysis, politics

Abstract

This book could not have been written with-out the original impulse that came from my own very early engagement with the problem of “group upbringing” many years ago in a seminar taught by Edward Steinberg, when I tangled for the first time with the question of family relations beyond the norm and with the idea that normativity may, quite possibly, not be founded in nature. Quite everything was changed after such a realization. Elizabeth Stewart, Lyndsey Stonebridge, and Judith Surkis have had a tremendous impact on the pages that follow. As rigorous thinkers, they harness the demands of thought to a personal commitment to justice that transcends private considerations. Because of this, they are capable of transforming private despair into a “writing of anxiety” (the phrase is Lynd-sey Stonebridge’s) and in that very move and countering Freud’s claim that women do not sublimate (his daughter Anna would prove otherwise)construct a figure of woman who therefore makes good on her claims. They challenge all things: private, personal, and political, as well as normative and transgressive. They therefore muddle me in the best of ways.