Dining with Anna Freud

On a warm fall morning I entered Michael John Burlingham’s apartment, located on a fashionable SoHo street in New York City. He had agreed to be interviewed for the Herald to discuss his work. Mr. Burlingham was interested in a psychoanalyst’s reaction to a recently completed screenplay on the early history of psychoanalysis.

Dressed casually, talking with a soft and welcoming tone, he invited me to take a seat and offered me a freshly made espresso. On the wall, near a picture of his college-age son, I noticed a black-and-white photo of two elderly women sitting at opposite ends of a table. A richly textured tablecloth covered the table. Between the women stood a bronze statue of Buddha and an Egyptian coffin mask. Above them, perfectly centred on a clean wall, hung an etching of Sigmund Freud.

The women are smiling at each other under the protective gaze of the father of psychoanalysis. They seem to be ignoring the camera; two powerful, self-confident, if not defiant, figures basking under the eyes of the master. On the left sits Dorothy Burlingham; to her right, Anna Freud on the right.

Michael Burlingham is the grandson of the woman seated on the left, and he took the photo in 1979. “They asked me where they should look, and I said they should look at each other. Anna Freud replied, to Dorothy, ’I don’t mind looking at you a bit.’”

Dorothy Burlingham was the US heiress who, in 1925, moved to Europe with her four children. After a brief stay in Geneva, Dorothy went to Vienna and became Sigmund Freud’s analysand and Anna Freud’s best friend and companion until Dorothy’s death in 1979.

In his highly praised book The Last Tiffany: a Biography of Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, Mr. Burlingham brings to the page a vivid and moving portrayal of a courageous and creative educator and psychoanalyst.

Mr. Burlingham has now completed 4,000 Miles, a screenplay that he hopes to turn into a major motion picture. 4,000 Miles is bound to broaden the understanding of the early years of that “dangerous method” called psychoanalysis, just as David Cronenberg’s new film of that name has done.

While Mr. Burlingham’s book covers four generations, he decided to focus the screenplay on the critical years his grandmother spent in Vienna, as well as the war years in London, a span of two decades.

Mr. Burlingham’s father, Bob, was Dorothy’s eldest child. Bob was barely 10 years old when, together with his three siblings, he was brought to Vienna. Shortly after, he and his sister Mabbie started analysis with Anna Freud. At that time Anna Freud was just beginning to develop techniques to analyze children. The Burlingham children were, in fact, among the first children ever analyzed, and their cases served as clinical illustrations in Anna Freud’s well-known Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis (1927).

Mr. Burlingham visited his grandmother twice as an adult at her home in London, now the Freud Museum. “I felt intimidated by Anna. She was so powerful. You know, Anna Freud was not a social animal. At dinner one evening she studied my wife from head to toe without uttering a word. Finally she abruptly asked her, ‘What does it feel like to be the oldest?’ On another visit I was 27 years old and, hoping to hide my nervousness, kept my fidgeting hands under the table. But I soon realized that Anna wasn’t listening to what I was saying at all but instead studying my hands. So I stopped fidgeting, and she immediately muttered, ‘That’s better.’”

Mr. Burlingham considers Anna Freud to have been “a power player, an Alpha woman” who deeply influenced his grandmother’s decisions in life and controlled his family’s destiny for 50 years. “My father was surely Anna’s longest analysand.” Ultimately, his grandmother was forced to choose between joining her family in the US and staying with Anna. “It was a kind of Sophie’s choice.”

Ironically, Dorothy –who was separated from her children– specialized in the treatment of children who, in World War II, had been separated from their parents during the Blitz.

Dorothy grew up in a hothouse of astonishing luxury and aesthetic beauty, though she found little in the way of affection or support. Her mother died when she was 12, and her father, glass artist Louis Comfort Tiffany, was strict and determined to rule her fate. He actually pulled her out of high school so she could not attend college. When she left her husband, Dr. Robert Burlingham, who was bipolar, she felt that the only way forward was to escape to Europe with her young children.

Shifting in his chair, Michael Burlingham said, “I’m sure you are wondering about the nature of my grandmother’s relationship with Sigmund Freud’s beloved daughter. Everybody I’ve talked to wants to know whether they were lesbians.” He proceeded to assure me that when he published his biography of Dorothy in 1989, he lacked evidence of the sexual nature of the two analysts’ relationship. To him they were partners, and “it seemed unlikely that they could have secretly maintained a sexual liaison.” Moreover, Mr. Burlingham reflected, “Freud’s belief that homosexuality was an indication of developmental arrest made me skeptical of the possibility that Freud’s illustrious daughter was actively homosexual.”

The closest indication of homosexuality was a comment made to Mr. Burlingham by an analyst who once visited Dorothy and Anna’s country cottage near Vienna. He noticed that Dorothy and Anna shared a double bed. “But that was it” – suggestive but hardly conclusive proof.

Recently, however, Mr. Burlingham was able to gather additional information that helped him clarify a confusing and mysterious side of his grandmother. He learned about notes his father had made on his deathbed regarding the love between Dorothy and Anna. The gist: Dorothy and Anna had shared a “very intimate relationship.” Paula Fichtl, who was Dorothy’s cook and later worked for the Freuds, confirmed the intimate nature of their relationship.

Dorothy and Anna “did everything they could to hide their relationshipàprobably to protect Anna’s father. Now I’m convinced that they were lesbians, which was nice to know for my screenplay,” said Mr. Burlingham.

In Europe Dorothy found more than a career. Anna Freud became mentor and substitute parent, father and mother, all in one, but at a high price for the young Burlinghams.

If Mr. Burlingham is distrustful of psychoanalysis, he says, it is because of the way child analysis was conducted in its infancy by its most influential practitioner, who functioned as a kind of analytic stepparent for the Burlingham children. “That method, which today would subject Anna Freud to disciplinary action, hurt my father and his siblings.”

Mr. Burlingham wouldn’t comment on who he would like to see play Dorothy and Anna in his film. “Others are better qualified to make those decisions,” he says. Certainly they would have to be powerful actors, just like the characters they would portray.

4000 Miles. “4,000 Miles is a bittersweet story about the transformative power of love. The true story of love between two women who happen to be the daughters of famous men. Louis Tiffany and Sigmund Freud have nothing in common, but when Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham meets Anna Freud, her life changes forever. In 1925 Dorothy has children but no career; Anna has a career but no children. Against the odds, they forge a seemingly unbreakable bond, each providing what the other never dreamed possible – first in Vienna until the Nazi takeover, then in London during the Blitz. Ultimately, however, Dorothy is forced to choose between her life with Anna Freud and her family-whose welfare had sparked her odyssey 20 years earlier.

“The script is based on my bookThe Last Tiffany, which The New Yorker called a ‘success’ and Psychoanalytic Books hailed as ‘one of the best biographies in the whole history of psychoanalysis.’ Dorothy Burlingham was my grandmother, and my father, one of Anna Freud’s first patients. I grew up in New York and in London, near the house that Grandmother shared with Anna Freud, now the Freud Museum.”