Enigmatic Messages from Anna and Dorothy: Theorizing my Lesbian Ghost Hunt Through Psychoanalytic History

In this article, I explore my personal fascination with the historic relationship between Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham through the lens of queer historiography, ‘lesbian ghosts feminism’, and Laplanchean psychoanalytic theory. Mobilizing Derrida’s Archive Fever and Saketopoulou’s traumatophilia, I interrogate my compulsive fascination with archival absences and the temptation to construct ‘infantile sexual theories’ about liminally queer figures in psychoanalysis. Drawing on an autoethnographic account of my interactions with archival fragments, biographical material, and the representation of Freud and Burlingham’s relationship in the film Freud’s Last Session (2024 ) , I argue for sustaining the enigma of their relationship rather than resolving it. Thickening this theoretical approach, I illuminate how encounters with incomplete psychoanalytic archives stimulate creative theorization, revealing intersections of sexuality and mythosymbolic structures in the traumata of the history of psychoanalysis. Ultimately, I suggest that embracing unsettling engagements with ambiguity in psychoanalytic history can enliven and support queering and decolonizing practices within the contemporary psychoanalytic clinic.