Anastasia, Ask Your Analyst by Lois Lowry Page B

adolescent people hate their mothers."
    Freud smiled benignly from the desk.
    "I don't really hate her," Anastasia went on. "But she bugs me. Right now it's bugging me that she wants my advice about a complicated problem. How on earth is a thirteen-year-old person supposed to be able to solve a problem that a thirty-eight-year-old person can't solve?"
    She looked quizzically at Freud. "How old are
you?
" she asked.
    He smiled.
    "Well, okay, I know that's not the sort of question you're supposed to ask your psychiatrist," Anastasia acknowledged.
    "I wish you could talk," she sighed. Then she caught sight of the book that was still on the floor beside her bed. Now that she had taken over the cleaning of her
room, Anastasia had begun vacuuming
around
things. It didn't make any sense to her, the way her mother did it; her mother picked things up, vacuumed, and then put the things back down. Anastasia just went around them; it seemed more logical.
    She flipped through the pages of the book on Freud. The phrase "dependent relations" caught her eye. It sounded appropriate. She was a "dependent," she knew; her father had told her that. He listed her as a "dependent" on his income tax every year.
    And she was certainly a "relation." She figured she was her mother's closest relation, except maybe for her father.
    "Sigmund," she suggested, "I would like you to tell me something about my relation, Mom, since I am her dependent."
    She looked again in the book, at the place where she had seen the phrase "dependent relations."
...the derivation of the super-ego from the first object-cathexes of the id, from the Oedipus complex, signifies even more for it. This derivation, as we have already shown, brings it into relation with the phylogenetic acquisitions of the id and makes it a reincarnation of former ego-structures which have left their precipitates behind in the id.
    She read it through a second time. She glanced over at Freud. His smile looked, suddenly, a little like a smirk.
    You ratfink, Sigmund, she thought. What kind of help is
that?
    Anastasia closed the book, adjusted her glasses, and looked through them down her nose at her psychiatrist. What would Queen Elizabeth say, she wondered, to a psychiatrist who laid a trip on her?
    "Your views are interesting," she said to Freud in her Queen Elizabeth voice. "I'll give them some thought, when I find time.
    "Right now, though," she added, "I have more important things to deal with."

    She found her parents in the study. Her father, as usual, was reading. Her mother was knitting a sweater. Anastasia made a fervent secret wish that the sweater would not be for her.
    She hated her mother's hand-knit sweaters. Everybody she knew wore store-bought sweaters from Sears or Jordan Marsh. But her mother wouldn't buy sweaters; oh no, nothing that ordinary for Mrs. Krupnik.
She
had to knit these horrible sweaters—with cables in them, of all things. Talk about
preppy.
Yuck.
    Her father was even wearing one, at this very moment. He didn't even
mind
that he had to wear gross handmade sweaters, with cables. Maybe if she could save up enough money she would someday, for his birthday, buy him a decent Orion sweater at Sears.
    "I was thinking about what you said, Mom," said Anastasia, flopping down on the couch. "And I consulted Freud. Is it okay if I talk about it in front of Dad?"
    "Sure," said her mother. "He and I don't agree on how to deal with Nicky Coletti, but we'd both be interested if you can come up with some great scheme."
    Her father put down his paper and lit his pipe. "Does it really help, to consult a plaster psychiatrist?" he asked.
    "Sure," said Anastasia. "Freud is very helpful."
    "That's fascinating. And you actually asked him about the problem with Sam's friend?"
    "
Dad
" explained Anastasia impatiently, "you don't consult someone like Freud about nursery school problems, not
specifically.
You ask Freud general sorts of questions about human relationships. Like—well, like this