For a short while, it appeared I had a bright future in psychoanalysis: Thanks to my friendship with the formidable Kurt Eissler, I was offered a position with the Freud Archives. In fact, I was to take over from Eissler in a year or two. Meanwhile, he wanted me to work with Anna Freud so that eventually her home could become a research center for Freud studies.
So in 1980 I met Anna Freud and developed a working relation with her and a sort of friendship. Apart for my work for the Freud Archives, I was interested in researching the reasons why Freud seemed to have changed his mind about child abuse: at first he believed his patients remembered real abuse; later he changed his mind and decided that almost all sexual abuse, especially if the father was accused, could only be a fantasy, or a screen memory, that is a memory that screened an early desire for the parent of the opposite sex....