‘To Destroy’: Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham in the Freud Archive

Abstract

In a 1960 letter to her lifelong collaborator Dorothy Burlingham, Anna Freud described the ambiguities of existing as a woman and as a member of the Freud family within psychoanalytic institutions. Burlingham later marked this letter with the words ‘To destroy’ on the grounds that it was ‘too personal’. This article draws on the newly catalogued Dorothy Burlingham collection in the Freud Museum archive to consider both Anna Freud’s letter and Burlingham’s attempt to remove it. One context is a debate around the nature and function of the archive, fought out in letters between Anna Freud, Kurt Eissler and Dorothy Burlingham from 1960 to 1972. In that correspondence Eissler pressured Burlingham to convince Anna Freud to include her manuscripts in the archive. The letters held there also raise the question of Burlingham’s own absence from psychoanalytic histories.