Was Anna Freud a “friend of Dorothy”? A queer phenomenological historiography of Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham's personal and professional relationship

Abstract

The nature of Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham's 5-decade-long personal and professional relationship has always been subject to speculation. This paper considers the historiography of this important and enigmatic relationship from 1920s Vienna to today. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology, which theorises sexual orientation and whiteness in spatial terms, I illustrate how the relationship was seen as deviating from the ‘straight lines’ of mid-20th century heteronormative society. I extend this queer phenomenological approach to think about cultural orientations to the relationship through an examination of its depiction in biographies published in the 1980s, the collections at the Freud Museums in London and Vienna, and a fictionalised account of Anna Freud's life published in 2014. Extending Ahmed's queer phenomenological vocabulary, I identify examples of ‘straightening up’, ‘straightening devices’ and ‘straightening up by queering’. The possibility of finding ‘queer angles’ in Anna Freud's early clinical writings, in contrast to the normative tendencies of her later writing on ego psychology, is explored as a counterbalance to discussions about non-normative sexuality and gender in psychotherapy which typically position these as something new. The relevance for clinical practice today is considered through the lens of an ethical imperative to find space for queer angles in the history of psychoanalysis.