PUTNEY — Award-winning author Rebecca Coffey of Putney has written a researched, but heavily fictionalized, novel of the life of the pioneering child psychoanalyst Anna Freud.
Pending in June from She Writes Press, Hysterical: Anna Freud's Story already is getting rave reviews from Booklist and the Lambda Literary Foundation, a LGBT literary organization.
“I'm also told that Oprah's magazine [O, The Oprah Magazine] will recommend it in either May or June's issue,” says Coffey.
The multi-faceted Coffey is a documentary filmmaker, radio commentator, and print journalist who contributes regularly to Scientific American and Discover Magazine. Her writing has also appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Rumpus, and other online literary magazines.
Another of her most recent major works, the ebook Murders Most Foul: The School Shooters in Our Midst, analyzes the “slaughter-style killings” that have hit America's schools and universities hard since 1927.
Hysterical is Coffey's take on an “autobiography” by Anna Freud.
Coffey writes on the novel's dust jacket that she examines each of the forces that shaped the influential psychoanalyst's life, which “spanned two centuries, three continents, and both world wars, and was enlivened by her and her father's relationships with some of their era's most brilliant minds.”
Anna Freud, the sixth and last child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays, lived from 1895 to 1982.
“More than just Sigmund favorite child, Anna became her father's sounding board as he shaped his theories. As he aged, she became his chief protector and a profoundly influential psychoanalyst in her own right,” Coffey adds.
Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, regarded as founders of psychoanalytic child psychology, have been the subject of ranging scholarship and biography. Coffey's fictional memoir, the author says, is the first novel to “reveal” Anna's secrets.
Coffey, again discussing the text, promises two blockbusters:
“First, although Sigmund warned that analysis is an erotic arena that should never be risked with a family member, at around the time that the young Anna began having intense 'friendships' with other young women, he analyzed his youngest daughter.”
For at least 1,000 hours, Coffey says, father and daughter “dissected her dreams, her memories, and, most disturbingly, her sexual fantasies, ones in which she was beaten by an enraged father figure.”
Second, Coffey says, “although Anna never publicly contradicted her father's 'wisdom' in the matter of lesbianism,” she would live for 54 years with her partner, divorcée (and child psychoanalyst and educator) Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, and raise her children together.
The author says her novel asks, “What exactly happened in Sigmund's analysis of Anna? Was it the erotically charged echo chamber that Sigmund said analysis always is? If so, what effect might it have had on Anna's burgeoning sexuality?”
“Freud broke a fundamental rule of psychoanalysis: 'Don't try this at home,'” Coffey argues. “The effects of analysis on Anna were devastating. I am not trying to say that Freud was evil. But with all his huge intellect, he was also just a man of his time.”
Coffey says she believes that the Lambda Literary Foundation is interested in her novel in large part because the book takes up Anna's sexual coming of age.
She adds that rumors about Anna Freud's homosexuality had circulated for years “but information was repressed.”
Coffey says she had begun to write a traditional biography on Anna Freud, which would take up her presumed homosexuality, but says she was frustrated in accessing certain papers on Anna held at the Sigmund Freud Archives, documents housed at the U.S. Library of Congress and in the former residence of Sigmund Freud during the last year of his life:
“I intended this book to be straight journalism, but since my access to the documents was blocked I chose a different path.”
Coffey says she believes the archive, in its “homophobic suppression” of the facts, diminishes the full picture of this remarkable woman, Anna, who overcame many obstacles in her life.
And so Coffey decided to tell her story from Anna's point of view. Her version would invent scenes and conversations that would reveal the private life of Anna, which Coffey contends is essentially true.
“The job of a novelist is to simplify and magnify,” says Coffey. “The responsibility is to present a good character and plot. I am not a Freud scholar. This book is indeed fiction, which is a lot more fun. But most of what I write in Hysterical actually happened. I would say 80 percent of the novel adheres to the significant events of her life.”
“Understanding how much is real and how much is invented is part of the fun of reading my book,” she says.
“I'm searching for the truth about Anna Freud. The intent of this novel is to bring Anna Freud alive as the genuine person she was,” Coffey says.