Growing Up Freudian : ANNA FREUD: A BIOGRAPHY <i> by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (Summit Books: $22.95; 492 pp.; photographs; 0-671-61696-X) </i>

Anna Freud (1895-1982) opened the way for this brilliant account of her odyssey by carefully preserving a great variety of documentation from all periods of her life. Consistent with a tendency she once defined as “altruistic surrender,” she transformed the very data of her life into a final gift to others.

Her story begins with the unintended conception of the sixth and last child of Sigmund and Martha Freud. It continues with rejection by her mother, the many sides of her struggle as the youngest, analysis with her father, the transition from elementary school teacher to psychoanalyst, the years in which she became co-founder of the field of child analysis (separate from, but parallel with, Melanie Klein), and her continuing development--through years of war, personal turmoil and bereavement--into the world’s most lucid and exact thinker about the emotional life of children.

Using an extraordinary archive of correspondence, combined with material from published scientific papers now seen to be based on Anna Freud’s own life, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl has written a thoroughly absorbing and well-rounded book. She shows unvarying respect for her data, and no aspect of it is sensationalized.

Freud’s lifelong devotion to her father and his cause (and the achievements that are a part of that devotion) was made inevitable by the fact that it was he who analyzed her. Contemporary readers know that such an arrangement is unsound and potentially disastrous. We feel a certain sadness that the door to a more normal life was closed for young Anna Freud. She never married and never had an affair of the heart, though she was courted by a number of men, among them Ernest Jones, her father’s deputy in England, and August Aichhorn, a Viennese colleague. She eventually lived with her dear friend Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, whose children she analyzed. Her relationship with Burlingham, who became an analyst with a special interest in blind children and whom Freud called her twin, was tender and loving and, in that way, fulfilling, but it was a chaste, unsexual life. (The theme of twinship winds its way through these pages.)

Freud’s personal triumph lay in the fact that within the limits laid down in childhood, she succeeded in making a rewardingly complex and distinctly personal life of her own. She quotes one of her several mother-substitutes, Lou Andreas-Salome, as having written “that it does not matter what fate one has if only one really lives it.”

Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938 forced the Freuds to move from Vienna to London, where Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham set up the Hampstead War Nurseries. After the war, its successor, the Hampstead Child-Therapy Course and Clinic, became the world’s leading center for research and training in child analysis. Data accumulated about children of all sorts, normal ones, those with symptoms that required psychoanalysis, the handicapped and others who needed a different kind of help, generated a vast experience that showed the unlimited variety of forms a childhood may take. The clinic provided a built-in corrective to easy generalization.

Freud’s extensive writings, always clear, lively, original and diversely clinical, are a reflection of her attitude toward the study of children. She believed in direct observation in addition to treatment, with the reports of many observers of many children deepening the basis for possible conclusions. Furthermore, psychoanalysis was not seen as the only appropriate treatment for emotional conflicts in childhood. Her unparochial attitude was a corrective for the narrowness of individual experience.

For her insistence on scientific fairness, Freud was ostracized by Melanie Klein and her coterie as superficial and rigid. Although she did not--probably could not--venture deeply into writing about the mother-child relationship, she was nevertheless the most scientifically minded and lucid thinker in psychoanalysis since her father. By comparison, the Kleinian view, with its muscular insistence on having all the answers (the analytic equivalent of anabolic steroids), looks, even with its undoubted brilliance, as if it were a plot hatched in a cave; Heinz Kohut’s embrace of empathy, presumably a corrective to the traditional objective psychoanalytic attitude, looks mystical and sentimental; and Jacques Lacan’s point of view, with its tonic attention to language, is a means of proving that the French voice is more reasonable than the English one.

The details of Anna Freud’s girlhood conflicts over masturbation, her relationship to her father, the configuration of the circle around Freud, the rivalry between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein within the British Society, the struggle for child analysis to be given parity with adult analysis in the world community, the conflict over whether a medical degree is essential in the education of a psychoanalyst--all these make for compelling reading for anyone interested in the politics that attach themselves to ideas.

Anna Freud embodied the spirit not of art but of science, i.e. the search for truths, not for a means of personal expression. She wrote: “The analyst’s task is not to create, i.e. to invent anything, but to observe, to understand, and to explain.” As our century comes to an end, and, as they did in the latter stages of the 19th, people become obsessed by the mysterious and the magical, the scientific and humane legacy of Anna Freud will stand, an enduring monument to reason.