Anna Freud @deathofthefatherofpsychoanalysis - Tumblr Blog

We are aware only of the empty space in the forest, which only yesterday was filled with trees.

I will never forget the legacy that my father left me, and all that he taught me. My life with Papa may not have been the easiest, but I have always been my Father's Daughter, and I will continue to stand for all that he believed in. He was my greatest hero. I will be lonely without Papa. We all will. There will be many moments in time when I look back on my life with Papa, and I will be upset by it, I will laugh at it, and I will wish to go back to it. However, I will instead push forward and uncover what my father was working toward, and perhaps I will follow my own lead on this part of the journey. But he will always be there with me, haunting me and guiding me alike. I cannot bear to look at his face. Only moments ago was he alive, looking at me, asking me to be there with him, just the two of us. There are many things that I learned from Papa, but I think that the most important thing that I ever got from him was his love of the work, which I am proud to have inherited. Thank you for making me the woman I am today.

#Movement X

We live trapped, between the churned-up and examined past and a future that waits for our work.

#Movement X

I think I'll miss Papa terribly. I also think that I just want him to be at peace, to be happy. He has left our games unfinished, but I suppose that is rather like him. It is strange. It seems that only now, in his final moments that he has made peace with me. For everything. For being a woman, for being lesbian, for being everything that he wanted somebody else to be, and for seeing him at his good and bad times. I think that for the first time in my life, he might actually love me, even if he doesn't actually say it. I hope that he is happy. I wish him no regrets. Goodbye, Papa. I love you, Dad.

#Movement X

If some longing goes unmet, don't be astonished. We call that Life.

#Movement X

As a Daughter

A Message to Papa: Am I not good enough for you, Papa? But I am here with you. Out of all of us, I was the only one that stayed with you, with your beliefs and convictions, and with you. I am here now, trying to take care of you, but you refuse to acknowledge me. Why? I know that you want to die. That you are in pain, but you want to go on your own terms. To know that you are dying and analyze your thoughts as you slip away, but Papa. I am here, and I want to help you. I know that there is nothing I can do for your cancer, but if there is anything that I can do, please. I want to do it. I want to be useful to you. I know that I am not the son that you wanted to be here with you, to succeed you, but can't I be good enough for you? Please. Let me say goodbye to you. You have been everything to me, father, mentor, my guide, my light in the darkness. I need you. But if you can't be with me, I need to know that you want me to continue. That you trust me. I need for you to see me as I am and accept me in order for me to go on. Can't you do that for me, Papa? I can be everything that you wanted in a child if you just let me be. Let me in. If you want to leave me now, at least set me free. Oh, I wish that time would just stop. If only I could stay in this moment with you. I am afraid of being alone, Papa. I am afraid of the silence. I love you, Papa.

#Movement X

I don't think that Papa has ever understood me. He has never once reached out to me to ask me about what I wanted. He never stopped to look at me. Not just analyze me as a subject of observation, but really look at me, as his daughter, and as a human being. He has always thought of women as inferior. How then, can he think to have any semblance of understanding of us? Of me? I have been a faithful daughter to him, following in his footsteps without really making any of my own footsteps in the beginning. His footprints were always much bigger than mine. But I have grown up and I have started to take over my own path, and at this point, I am walking side by side with him. I don't know when I joined his road, but I have taken it up as my own. And yet, I could not have done anything that I was able to achieve had it not been for the education that he gave me. Because of that, I was able to reach a level which most women could not have. I sometimes wonder whether he ever expected me to reach the intellectual level that I have obtained and that I plan on expanding upon. I will show him one day that I am as good as any of his so-called successors who never actually became his successor. I will make him proud of me, make him see that I am just as capable as any man. I am good enough, and if I am not yet, then I can be in the future.

#Movement X

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Everything becomes so problematic because of basic faults: from a discontent with myself.

#Movement V

It is often strange to look at myself and my life. I can look at who I was and who I have become. Sometimes I am proud of all that I have accomplished. Other times, I wish that I could live in one moment for all of my life. Over the years, I have often contained much that I was feeling inside of me, and away from prying eyes. I had had enough of that in the past. Which then leads me to my sexuality, and how my life has been shaped as a result of that. I must confess that I do not like to talk about it much, but I have been thinking about it recently, especially being around my father in such a setting as this one. Plainly, I am a lesbian. I know that there is no shame in that. It is a part of who I am. And yet, my father could never accept that. There was no real coming out to him for me. He analyzed me. For a long time. Years. And he had me tell him about my fantasies and my longings, and... It was the most humiliating thing for me to have to tell him, my own father, about my sexual desires, every night. For him to look at me the way he did. He refused to accept it. He thought that there was something wrong about it, and that I was mentally ill. He thought it was his fault and that he had to cure me of this terrible illness by psychoanalyzing me. It was torture to me in so many ways. I love women. It isn't an illness, but a part of who I am, and yet, it is unacceptable in his eyes. There were times when I hated myself for it, that I cursed myself for those traitorous feelings that caused him to look at me in that way, when all I wanted was to please him. I eventually realized that I could never do that, though I suppose I never stopped trying. At some points in my life, I wished that I could just be normal. I wanted to be the way my father wanted me to be. I tried to have relationships with men, but I just couldn't do it. I wanted my father to be happy with me, but I finally was able to see the limit of sacrificing my own happiness. And then I felt ashamed. Of myself. For what I was feeling, but mostly because I was trying to suppress it. I couldn't pretend that I wasn't feeling what I did anymore. If I couldn't be truthful to myself, then I couldn't be a psychoanalyst, or even an independent adult woman. I think that this is what helped me to finally understand who I was and that I was not my father and that I didn't have to be him. I had my own interests to pursue and my own mind to use. Even so, I don't think that I will ever be truly free of my father's judgment of me.

#Movement V

Blogging and Loneliness

I don't know yet how I feel about blogs. They are peculiar in that they are a diary of one's thoughts and life, and yet, for some reason, people will read the blogs of other people. Are they lonely and looking for something to make them feel better about themselves or their lives? I sometimes can understand it, and other times, the purpose is unclear. I have been keeping a sort of journal/diary myself, but a personal one, just for me. In it, I can write my thoughts, my dreams, and whatever I am feeling at the time. Later I can revisit what I have written, but I usually don't do that. The journal is just a way for me to get out of my system what is inside of me, and release it. Everybody has a different way of doing this. Some people do art, others use their work, and others write, but somehow, what a person feels has to emerge from their body at some time. Otherwise, they cannot function. The difference between a blog and a journal however is the difference in privacy. Anybody can read a blog, and that is allowing one's inner thoughts and words to be subjected to criticism and judgment. In that case, a person's mood can be entirely defined by the response to their blog. But the reason for writing a blog in the first place, that is also an interesting topic. There are many reasons for doing so, but I feel that the most overwhelming reason is loneliness and feeling as though one's life is not being given enough credit, that it is being taken for granted and is always passed over. People believe that no one sees them and they feel small, so they want people to read their thoughts. They want somebody to take an interest in their lives. I often think that loneliness dictates a lot of what people do. It has certainly dictated a lot of my life. Perhaps that is why I am writing this blog. Living with my father has often made me feel that I cannot express what I am truly feeling in any way, but especially not aloud. I don't want my father going into my head. Often, when people go to see a therapist or psychoanalyst, they are seeing a stranger, so it is not as personal, and it can be helpful for them to get into their mind, but for me, it is so much more difficult because it is my father looking at me and observing me and passing judgment on me, and that terrifies me. I don't want him of all people to see inside of me and know me when I do not even know all of myself. But the worst part is that I can see him doing it. I know that he is doing it because I do the same thing that he does. Sometimes, I try to analyze him. Sometimes I think that I know what he is thinking. Sometimes I do know that, and that can be even worse. Then, there are the days when he is analyzing me and I am analyzing him, and we are each watching the other analyze us, and we know that we are analyzing each other, and it is during those times when I just want to take a step back and look at the simple things in my life.

#Movement V

I've always wanted to ask Papa, What do you see when you look at yourself? And then I want to ask him, What do you see when you look at me? Observing people is a part of the job of an analyst, but how can you not simultaneously be looking and observing yourself? And when you do, does it unnerve you as much as it does me? I have made my life out of getting into the why and how of a person's mind, and in doing that, I am able to see all of my shortcomings. Every way in which I try to evade something, I can see myself trying to avoid it, which means I cannot avoid it. Papa, are you lonely? Is that why you work so much? To fill the loneliness? I don't think that works for me. I still feel lonely. Do you think that if two people who are lonely are sort of stuck with each other, but they have a similar loneliness, that they might not feel the loneliness so much? I don't know.

#Movement V

How one can live without being able to judge oneself, criticize what one has accomplished, and still enjoy what one does, is unimaginable to me.

#Movement V

The mind truly is a wonderful thing. It is difficult to understand, but beautiful. It works in the strangest ways, and becomes a sort of art form. Everything that we think and do as human beings, it all stems from something, somewhere, or someone, and it is the most mind-boggling but fascinating practice as a psychoanalyst to map it out, to trace everything back to its origin and to understand why people think and say and do what they do. It is also a terribly trying and frightening experience, because you start to see your life, your everyday life and your past and your present through these glasses that allow you to see everything incredibly clearly, and yet there are multiple times when you wish you could just take the glasses off, but if you do, then you end up walking around blind, bumping into everything, and that is even scarier.

#Movement V

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Papa was never a conventional father. I don't suppose I know what that really means. Perhaps there isn't any real meaning to a conventional person besides the idea that each person imagines them to be. Still, with Papa, he was more of a teacher and a mentor to me than a father who loved me. He didn't like doing anything impractical with no return. And yet, I still loved him. Being the youngest of six, it was always difficult to get his attention. He had dreams for us, aspirations that were never fulfilled. So I fulfilled them. And it became fun. At first, we would just talk, and then, once I started to get older and dive deeper into psychoanalysis with him, I developed a sort of connection with him. A love for him and for his passion for his work, rather than the sullen, dejected feeling that I used to get when he wouldn't talk to me as a human being, as his daughter. And now, seeing him need me for once, even if he refuses to admit it, is a sort of satisfying feeling. I feel as though I can finally do something for him and that I am a necessary part of his life, and yet it is strange. Taking care of him has allowed me to see him as not only my father, but now as a person as well. It is frustrating to deal with him sometimes, with his whims and his unwillingness to admit the need for help, but it has allowed me to see him more clearly, and even perhaps to understand him, if only a little bit.

#Movement II

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