Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham: Queer Encounters with the Psychoanalytic Archive

This special edition of Psychoanalysis and History emerges from two queer encounters that took place at the Freud Museum London in early 2025: a tour focusing on Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham's shared life in the house that became the Freud Museum, and a symposium the next day that considered the representation of their relationship in the film Freud's Last Session. Against a backdrop of increasing global fascism, the contributions to this edition interrogate the erasure and ambiguity surrounding this historic relationship, situating questions about it within psychoanalysis’ complicity with and potential for resistance to normative forces around gender and sexuality. The contributors work with Kleinian, Lacanian, Laplanchean and psychosocial theory through a queer historiographic lens to explore how archival gaps, fantasies, cinematography and dyadic creativity can unsettle ossified narratives about psychoanalytic history and open space for alternative futures. By interrogating the binaries between repression and radicalism, concreteness and ambiguity, insiders and outsiders, the encounters set in motion by the contributions to this edition align with broader efforts to queer psychoanalysis, confront its colonial and normative legacies, and imagine a psychoanalysis that is responsive to contemporary struggles for gender, sexual, racial and disability justice. In doing so, it asks: what might psychoanalysis yet become in times of political regression?