Some parents act unwittingly, as if their authority over children is absolute and discipline their main responsibility. Obedience results through heated contest of wills. The purpose of children, from this perspective, is the same as any social group seen as "naturally" subservient-that of serving the needs of others. "Childism" was the word Elisabeth gave to this prejudice in her final book. When children are made into targets of prejudice, we deny their developmental needs and rights (Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children, 2012).

The same is true of the denigration of women. Both are forms of what Elisabeth called "obedience training," a kind of authoritarian rule that inhibits the evolution of self. She well understood the sexual biases in which women have been psychoanalytically entangled. (Freud On Women: A Reader, 1990)  For Elisabeth, psychoanalysis was a form of vocalized biography, two people working together to recover a life story. Of importance was situating this life narrative within a larger historical setting. Penis envy, a girl's second wave of repression, her turn away from her mother during puberty and the shift of her primary erotic zone-Elisabeth encouraged me to think beyond the effects of patriarchy. She knew that society evolves as the feminist movement grows from infancy, as the nuclear family changes, as habits of coupling and the means and forms of reproduction become more pluralistic.

Where does prejudice come from? Elisabeth systematically detailed these origins in her The Anatomy of Prejudices (1996), where she argues that these habits of thinking are not one, but many. Drawing on Freud's essay "Libidinal Types" (1931), she outlined how prejudice in America is organized around "ideologies of desire" that correspond to the tripartite structure of the psyche: id, ego, and superego.

Unconscious fantasies play out in prejudice according to three character types: the hysterical, the narcissistic, and the obsessional. Hysterical prejudice is epitomized by racist sentiment: it represents genital power and involves projecting forbidden sexual drives onto another. Sexism (usually male, but not always) has a narcissistic foundation and is the most universal of all prejudices. It comes from an offense to the ego: the intolerable notion that there are people who are anatomically different from oneself. Finally, obsessional attitudes are governed by the superego, by fantasies of contamination and desires for purification-by wanting to eliminate something felt to be secretly depleting one from within. For example, anti-Semitism is an obsessional prejudice.

Acknowledging different kinds of prejudice allows for social diagnoses and treatment. This method of classification Elisabeth learned from her professor Hannah Arendt, whose The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) she considered the exemplary analysis of a modern prejudice. Reading this field manual on fascism was for her like facing a vast mural, a "historian's Guernica" that the spectator can never fully absorb.

Before becoming a psychoanalyst, Elisabeth trained as a philosopher and political thinker with Arendt, a Jewish émigré from Nazi Germany who barely escaped prior to coming to New York City. From her, Elisabeth learned about the viewpoint of the pariah. She brought feminist knowledge of women, children, and minorities into philosophical and psychoanalytic inquiry. She was a great synthesizer.

Elisabeth suggested that masculine biases stem, in part, from male fantasies about reproduction that date back to Aristotle. Ancient Greeks shared belief in the biological theory that conception was a male act. According to this notion, reproduction results from a man implanting a sperm into the womb of a woman, without recognition of the function of the ovum. Although this theory and its anatomical distortions were scientifically abandoned in the West, the wish still remains. It is manifest today, writes Elisabeth, in abortion debates and homophobia. These wishes express the desire to view men as responsible for the fertilization and cultivation of "their" seed. Thus, children, along with women, are wild and irrational beings who require men's civilized restraints and domestication (Childism, 2012).

Questions about female sexuality, and its multiple lines of development, impressed Elisabeth as she apprehensively sifted through six steamer trunks of Anna Freud's letters. Following critical acclaim for her biography of Arendt, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1982), the executor of Anna Freud's literary estate asked her to write a biography of the daughter of psychoanalysis. Later in the day, Elisabeth rambled to Hans Loewald, her analyst in New Haven, about how exhausted she felt facing all those German papers and years of work that lay within them. 

There was also the elaboration of Anna Freud's partnership with Dorothy Burlingham with whom she directed the Hampstead War Nursery for children who were orphaned during WWII. Would it be her task, Elisabeth wondered aloud to Loewald, "to brave the homophobia of psychoanalysis with a lesbian life story?" Loewald replied mischievously in his Texas drawl, "Sweetheart, those two ladies lived together harmoniously, really harmoniously, for fifty years -- now, I ask you, could that be a sexual relationship?" (Subject to Biography: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Writing Women's Lives, 1998).

Elisabeth had a gentle and deeply feeling heart. She rearticulated Freud's first theory of the instincts, arguing that libido in all of us vacillates throughout our lives between active and passive aims, between our mental images of loved ones, both male and female. She came away from Anna's biography thinking that Freud's youngest child was a woman who could never capture her father's attention so she ceaselessly worked for her father's cause. Even Freud called his lifework his child, sometimes his Sorgenkind, his problem child. He gave it the solicitous parental attention that he could not give his biological children. (Anna Freud: A Biography, 1988).