Freud, Anna (1895–1982)

Pioneering psychoanalyst who made important theoretical contributions to child development and ego psychology and established a model for training analysts that remains the standard. Born Anna Freud in Vienna, Austria, on December 3, 1895; died in London, England, on October 8, 1982; daughter of Sigmund Freud (doctor, founder of psychoanalysis) and Martha Bernays (homemaker); graduated Cottage Lyzeum, Vienna, 1912; LL.D., Clark University, 1950; Sc.D., Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, 1964; LL.D., University of Sheffield, England, 1966; lived with her lifelong companion and collaborator, Dorothy Burlingham.

Commenced analysis with her father (1918); began psychoanalyzing adults and children and delivered her first paper before the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (1922); met Dorothy Burlingham and became a training analyst at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute (1925); established the Jackson Nursery for children (1937); immigrated to London (1938); established the wartime nurseries (1941); opened the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic (1951).

Publications:

Introduction to the Technic of Child Analysis (1927); The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936); Infants Without Families (with Dorothy Burlingham, 1944); Normality and Pathology in Childhood (1965).

When an aging Sigmund Freud needed to find a guardian to protect his most important creation—psychoanalysis—he turned to Anna Freud, the youngest of his six children. For more than 50 years, Anna Freud worked tirelessly to secure the future of psychoanalysis and safeguard its principles. The effects of her work are far reaching. As a gifted clinician and theoretician, her work in ego psychology and child development remain a part of the foundation upon which current psychoanalytic thought is built. And in the schools and research centers she established, she trained and influenced a generation of future analysts.

In 1895, the year of Anna Freud's birth, her father was an undistinguished neurologist who was plagued by physical ailments and financial worries. Sigmund Freud was only beginning to formulate his theories about the origins of hysteria and the existence of an unconscious. (The publication of The Interpretation of Dreams was still four years away.) Anna's mother Martha Bernays Freud was exhausted mentally and physically from the demands of the five children she had given birth to over the previous seven years. When their sixth child, Anna, arrived on December 3rd, it was with heavy hearts that the baby was welcomed into the house.

Robert Coles">

She was a strong moral and intellectual force in psychoanalysis for half a century.

—Robert Coles

That Anna Freud's mother was ambivalent toward her youngest child from the start is evident from her behavior. She chose not to nurse the baby as she had her previous children, and took her first vacation away from the family when Anna was only ten months old. Martha Freud was also a strict, idiosyncratic disciplinarian. "My mother observed no rules, she made her own rules," Anna Freud later remarked. Her mother's remote harshness caused the young Anna to seek comfort from her beloved nursemaid, Josefine Cihlaiz , and from her father, whom she adored.

As a young child, Anna Freud was adventurous and mischievous, traits that her father evidently encouraged. When Anna was two, Sigmund wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fleiss: "Recently Anna complained that [her eldest sister] Mathilde had eaten all the apples and demanded that [Mathilde's] belly be slit open (as happened to the wolf in the fairy tale of the little goat). She is turning into a charming child."

Anna Freud attended good private schools and graduated from high school at 15. Though she had been an imaginative, brilliant student, her professional ambitions were modest. She decided to become a schoolteacher and in 1914, at age 19, began an elementary school apprenticeship. For six years, she worked as an assistant and then as a certified teacher. She was genuinely fond of children and immensely interested in the way they learned. That keen interest would remain, and her later work in child psychoanalysis was always marked by a pedagogical imperative.

When Anna's school schedule allowed, she traveled with her father on the Continent and abroad, acting as his companion and secretary. She had always loved her father with a single-minded devotedness; not surprisingly, she began taking an interest in psychoanalysis. She read her father's books and discussed psychoanalytic ideas and methods with him. During the war, she began writing German translations of English psychoanalytic articles in an effort to help her father keep the psychoanalytic journals in print. Anna Freud was quickly absorbing her father's work and in the process was becoming his closest, most trusted confidante. Perhaps most significantly, she became his patient, a training analysand, in October 1918 when she was 23 years old.

Anna Freud discontinued teaching at the elementary school in 1920 and gave herself over fully to the study of psychoanalysis. She attended lectures at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and accompanied other analysts, former patients, and students of her father on ward rounds at the Psychiatric Clinic of the Vienna General Hospital. Later she remarked on her education in psychoanalysis: "We were trained by our personal analysts, [and] by extensive reading, by our own unsupervised efforts with our first patients, and by lively interchange of ideas and discussion of problems with elders and contemporaries."

In 1920, she attended a lecture by Siegfried Bernfeld which had an enormous impact on her life. Bernfeld had initiated a project called the Baumgarten Children's Home which provided food and shelter to Viennese Jewish war orphans. Anna Freud was deeply impressed with his work and realized that his interests in working with children, particularly those in crisis, mirrored her own. As an apprentice teacher, she had worked in a Kinderhort, a day care for working-class children, and more recently she had performed some volunteer work with young victims of the war. She initiated a study group that included, among others, Bernfeld and August Aichhorn. Aichhorn, a former teacher like Anna, was pioneering a new approach of applying psychoanalytic techniques to his work with delinquent adolescents. Aichhorn became a mentor

of sorts for Anna Freud, and with him she began an informal apprenticeship.

In 1922, Anna Freud began analyzing children and adults. In May of that year, she delivered her first paper, "Beating Fantasies and Daydreams," to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. The paper identified the repression of the "love fantasy" a child possesses for his/her father as the origin of post-Oedipal beating fantasies, and seems to have been based largely on her own analysis with her father. Shortly after delivering the paper, Sigmund Freud suffered the initial symptoms of an illness that required serious medical attention, and Anna Freud's analysis was suspended until 1924, when it resumed for another year or so.

In 1925, Anna Freud encountered for the first time the woman who would become her lifelong companion and collaborator, Dorothy Burlingham . Burlingham, accompanied by her four children, had arrived in Vienna from the United States as a training analysand of Sigmund Freud. Her eldest child underwent analysis with Anna Freud, as did subsequently all the Burlingham children. The two women became inseparable, eventually sharing a house and a life together. Anna had never shown the slightest romantic interest in any man; her affection and loyalties had remained directed to her father exclusively. Yet she loved children and seemed to desire companionship and a familial arrangement. By all accounts, the relationship was not homosexual in nature, but was "the ideal friendship" as Anna Freud referred to it, loving and nurturing, and one that offered her the challenging dual role of analyst and stepparent to the Burlingham children.

That same year, Anna joined the executive board of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute and began work as a training analyst. The Institute was set up by the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society to function as a training academy where students could systematically learn psychoanalytic theory and techniques. For Anna Freud, herself a lay analyst with no formal medical background, establishing the place of lay analysts in psychoanalysis was of paramount importance. A debate was then raging within the international psychoanalytic community over the advisability of placing psychoanalysis in the hands of those who did not possess a medical degree. When in 1927 she was elected secretary of the International Psychoanalytic Association, she became a key player in the debate.

As a training analyst at the Institute, Anna Freud had the opportunity to teach classes in child development to nursery and primary school teachers. She hoped to influence education by bringing the principles of psychoanalysis to bear on pedagogical practice. In 1927, with the help of Dorothy Burlingham and another friend, Eva Rosenfeld , Freud initiated her first independent educational experiment: a private school where young children could learn in a psychoanalytically informed environment. Future analysts such as Erik Erikson and Peter Blos taught there.

Her first book, Introduction to the Technic of Child Analysis, was published that same year. In it, she set about establishing the parameters of child analysis, putting forth new theories and techniques based on her own clinical work. The book called for a modification of the classic psychoanalytic technique of dream interpretation and free association pioneered by her father in favor of a technique of analysis which sought to exert an educational influence over the child. She defended this strategy by emphasizing the important differences between the psyches of adults and of children, namely the structure of the superego (which Anna Freud believed was weak in a child and subject to external influences), the inability of a child to develop a transference neurosis (due to its extreme dependence on its parents and environment), and the inability of the child to perceive itself as sick. "Everything is lacking in the situation of the child which seems indispensable to that of the adult: insight into illness, the voluntary decision to be cured and the will to be cured."

Anna Freud went a step further and encouraged therapists to try to gain the child's confidence. She stressed the importance of working with the parents, thus extending the work that is accomplished in the analytic hour to the home and school. These views differed sharply from the theories being developed by Melanie Klein , a child psychoanalyst who had worked in Berlin and was now practicing in England. Klein applied Sigmund Freud's classic psychoanalytic technique to children by analyzing and interpreting their play. Moreover, Klein believed children could develop a transference neurosis and that analyzing it was an important part of the analysis. Throughout Introduction to the Technic of Child Analysis, Freud systematically refuted Klein's theories using her own case histories and novel theories of child development. The debate between Freud and Klein would eventually move to England and play out more dramatically at the British Psycho-Analytical Society.

The publication of the book as well as her subsequent lectures based on it in Berlin and Budapest established Anna Freud's reputation in the international psychoanalytic community. Freud's techniques and theories of child analysis (along with those of her colleagues Aichhorn and Bernfeld) came to be known as the "Vienna School" and quickly dominated Continental Europe and America. The Vienna School from its inception was marked by pedagogical interests and involved in efforts to help delinquents and working-class children. Part of the efforts of Freud and her colleagues was to bring psychoanalysis out of the parlors of the bourgeois and into the tenements of the poor. A belief that parental and environmental factors influence child development and a conviction that altering environments can improve psychic development of children were hallmarks of the Vienna school.

Freud continued with her enormous work load of psychoanalysis, teaching and writing despite increasing political upheaval in Vienna. In 1935, at the age of 40, she began work on her most ambitious project, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. The book, published in May 1936 on Sigmund Freud's 80th birthday, is a major study of the ego's activity, particularly in adolescence, and expands the concepts of the ego, id and superego.

In The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, Anna Freud explores the conflicts that arise when the instinctual drive of the id comes into direct conflict with the ego, the psychic apparatus that experiences and reacts to the outside world and is governed by the conscience (or superego). She discusses the various mechanisms and effects of the ego's defense and cites two examples in particular: first, "identification with the aggressor" in which "by impersonating the aggressor [an outside anxiety-object], assuming his attributes or imitating his aggression, the child transforms himself from the person threatened into the person who makes the threats"; and second, "altruistic surrender," a projection of dangerous or forbidden wishes onto other people. The book is still considered one of the standard works in psychoanalysis and remains her most important theoretical contribution.

In February 1937, Freud established the Jackson Nursery for children under the age of two. The school admitted children from the poorest families in Vienna and provided these desperate youngsters with a nurturing environment. In addition to its charitable aim, the nursery offered Freud and Burlingham the opportunity to observe child development and behavior outside a clinical or laboratory setting. The childcare experiment came to an end in March of 1938 when Hitler invaded Vienna and the nursery was shut down. The Gestapo raided the Freud home on March 22, and Anna Freud was taken in for questioning, though she was quickly released. The Freuds realized that escape from Vienna was necessary. Psychoanalysts from Berlin and Vienna had already fled the Continent and resettled in London, finding refuge at the British Psycho-Analytical Society. On June 4, the Freuds left Vienna for England.

Anna Freud and her family settled at 20 Maresfield Garden in Hampstead where she would live the rest of her life. She spent much of the first year analyzing patients and caring for her father who was now in the advanced stages of cancer. (Sigmund Freud would die on September 23, 1939.)

In 1938, at the request of the head of the East London School district, Anna Freud gave a series of three public lectures on psychoanalysis. The lectures were received enthusiastically by London educators as well as by the band of Viennese emigre analysts. Certain members of the British Psycho-Analytical Society were less impressed. The theories of Melanie Klein dominated the intellectual life of the Society. Klein, however, had recently come under fire from some members of the Society for "unorthodox" views. The influx of emigre analysts from the Continent, particularly the appearance of Anna Freud, added to the friction, and the old theoretical debate between Freud and Klein flared up again. Eventually, unpleasant ideological disputes over training methods broke out at the British Psycho-Analytical Society. A compromise with the Kleinians seemed impossible and a split occurred in the Society, from which Freud attempted to distance herself.

In January 1941, she opened The Children's Rest Center, an evacuation residence for working class children. By summer, she was operating two more centers: A Babies' Rest Center in Hampstead and an evacuation center for older children in Essex. In the wartime nurseries, Freud and Burlingham observed firsthand the effects of institutional life and maternal separation on children.

Based on her observations, Anna Freud became convinced that children's development depends less on instinctual repression (as her father had believed) and more on their ability to form attachments to adults. In particular, she believed the bond between mother and child was crucial, and this theory set her on a course of pioneering a more mother-centered therapeutic approach. Within a year, Freud had restructured the nursery into family-like groups composed of four or five children and one "mother." Under the new arrangement, the children thrived. (Freud's family grouping system was later incorporated into postwar British childcare legislation.)

This emphasis on family was based, in part, on a theory of Aichhorn's that children brought up in a family setting fared much better than those raised in institutions. Anna Freud arrived at the same conclusion and attributed delays in language development and toilet training to the negative effects of institutional life on children. The institutional child, she noted "is at a disadvantage whenever the emotional tie to the mother or to the family is the mainspring of development."

Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham elaborated on their approach to institutional life in the 1942 booklet, "Young Children in War-time: A Year's Work in a Residential War Nursery." It was later expanded into a book, Infants Without Families: The Case For and Against Residential Nurseries, and published in 1944.

Freud's wartime nurseries closed in the summer of 1945, and she stopped analyzing children in 1949. But, in 1951, she opened the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic which became one of the most famous training and research centers in the world. As with Freud's earlier projects, the emphasis was on research into normal and abnormal childhood development based on the direct observation of children. Services at the Hampstead Clinic included psychoanalysis and training, a well-baby clinic, a kindergarten for working-class children, and a research unit. Freud devoted her time to training analysts, supervising the clinic's activities, writing and lecturing in the United States.

Based on her work with the wartime nurseries and on the research at the Hampstead Clinic, Anna Freud concluded that development involves gradual mastery of the id by the ego, or "the socialization of the drives." Although she believed that the presence of the mother was crucial to the success of this process, she shied away from identifying the mother as the root of all developmental problems.

Freud identified "lines of development" that constituted psychological growth, including gradual independence from the mother, maturation of drives and ego, and adaptation to the environment and object relations. She believed pathology in children was manifested in arrested development and produced not conflict but defects in a child's psychic structure and personality. She urged analysts to pay attention to these lines of development and not focus entirely on unconscious drives and ego functions. Anna Freud used this model in developing the Hampstead Diagnostic Profile which assessed pathology along developmental lines rather than by reference to adult psychiatric categories. Another important contribution of the Hampstead Clinic was the Hampstead Index, which aggregated individual case material thus providing "a collective psychoanalytic memory" of clinical examples of transference, acting out, reactions to interpretations and so on.

In the early 1960s, Freud's sphere of influence broadened to the area of childcare policy when she was invited to participate in seminars in family law at Yale University. Two books based on these seminars, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child and Before the Best Interests of the Child, were published, recommending child custody decisions be based on psychological rather than biological ties and that government minimize its interference in family matters.

Anna Freud suffered a stroke in March 1981 which seriously curtailed her activity. She remained confined to her home under the care of relatives and former students until her death on October 8, 1982, at the age of 86.

sources and suggested reading:

Coles, Robert. Anna Freud: The Dream of Psychoanalysis. Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1992.

Freud, Anna. The Writings of Anna Freud. Vols 1–8, London: Hogarth. Vol 1: The Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1927), 1974; Vol 2: The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, 1936; Vol 3: Infants Without Families (1944), 1968; Vol 4: Indications for Child Analysis and Other Essays (1945–1956), 1968; Vol 5: Research at the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic and Other Papers (1956–65), 1969; Vol 6: Normality and Pathology in Childhood 1965; Vol 7: Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique and Therapy (1966–70), 1971; Vol 8: Psychoanalytic Psychology of Normal Development (1970–80), 1982.

Sayers, Janet. Mothers of Psychoanalysis. NY: W.W. Norton, 1991.

Young-Bruehl, Elizabeth. Anna Freud. NY: Summit, 1988.

Suzanne Smith , freelance writer and editor, Decatur, Georgia

Anna Freud

Anna Freud's (1895-1982) pioneering efforts in establishing the theory and method of child psycho analysis expanded the legacy of her father, Sigmund Freud, while it applied psychoanalytic discoveries to practical problems of child care and development in her innovative child care and study centers. As an investigator, speaker, teacher, and writer, she established a training method and body of scientific work that greatly influenced the study of children in the late twentieth century.

Anna Freud, the youngest of Sigmund Freud's six children and the only one who became a psychoanalyst, was born in Vienna in 1895. In the same year, Sigmund Freud published Studies on Hysteria, regarded as the first work of what would come to be known as psychoanalysis. From her earliest years, she identified closely with her father. Freud's mother was more attached to the other children, however, and the youngest daughter seems to have envied her beautiful older sister Sophie. Throughout her life, Freud had a difficult and distant relationship with her mother, who was famously skeptical of psychoanalysis. The elder Freud later praised her intellectual interests, but he did not send her to schools that could prepare her for university. Instead she was sent to the Cottage Lyceum, a school for teachers.

In 1914, Freud was visiting England when World War I broke out. Helped by friends in the diplomatic community, she returned to Austria where, stimulated by the ideas of Maria Montessori, she began her career as an elementary school teacher. She taught in her old school during the war, but abandoned teaching soon afterwards to begin working more closely with her father. She briefly considered becoming a doctor but was dissuaded by him.

Freud increasingly assumed a role as her father's assistant, secretary, and proponent. In 1918, she entered analysis with the elder Freud. That same year she attended her first meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. She became immersed in the development of psychoanalysis and began attending psychoanalytic meetings, translating papers, and analyzing patients. In 1922, she delivered her first paper to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and soon afterwards was accepted as a member.

The period from the mid-1920s to 1938, when the Freuds were forced by the Nazi occupation of Austria to leave Vienna, was a period of rich intellectual activity and rapid development in psychoanalytic thought. Freud's first patients were adults, but she soon began treating children. Her work as a teacher served as a bridge to what was emerging as her life's work—the psychoanalytic study of the child. Her interest in working with the Berlin Clinic promised to grant her a degree of independence from her father, but she decided to remain in Vienna after her father narrowly escaped bleeding to death after outpatient surgery. In 1923, he was diagnosed with cancer and from then on Freud became his primary caretaker, secretary, and intellectual companion. In that year she also established her own private practice. During this time she also assumed increasingly responsible positions in the leadership of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association.

In 1925, she met Dorothy Burlingham, who had brought her children to Vienna for analytic treatment. Their friendship eventually deepened into a lifelong bond. During this time she also began a private analytically-oriented nursery school together with several other analysts, and also set up what is now regarded as the first modern day care center for underprivileged infants. The city of Vienna asked her in 1926 to train nursery workers and elementary teachers in applying the new analytic knowledge to education theory. That year she delivered four lectures, published as An Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis, which marked the recognition of child analysis as a legitimate sub-specialty. In 1929, she first warned childcare professionals against mistaking professional child care for mothering. Throughout her career, Freud continued to stress that child care and analysis itself cannot substitute for the early parental attachments which shape personality development.

The elder Freud defended his daughter against the differing views of Melanie Klein and others and came to admire her intellectual independence. In 1931, she became editor of the Journal of Psychoanalytical Education, a forerunner of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. By the early 1930s, however, opposition to Freud's ideas was growing among extremists in the Nazi Party in Germany, and in 1933 his books were burned in Berlin.

Her efforts at this time to define normal child development led her to expand on her father's ego theory in her influential work The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, published in 1936. The principal defense mechanism, she claimed, is repression, which develops as children learn that some impulses are harmful and cannot be acted upon. Child analysis was the best means, she believed, for examining the functions of the ego and the instinctual drives, since children respond to their own internal pressures and the demands of the external world with a wider and more creative range of defenses than do adults. Considered a classic, this work contained one of the first comprehensive examinations of the conflicts of adolescence and outlined her views of the structure and unity of the human personality.

In 1938, after Freud was interrogated by the Nazi Gestapo in Vienna, the family emigrated to England. In England, Freud went back to seeing patients and founded a nursery at her family's house for children who had been separated from their parents by the war. The Hampstead Wartime Nursery for Homeless Children provided a natural laboratory for Freud's views on the influence of parental separation on childhood development. In two books and a series of reports collected as Infants Without Families, Freud and Burlingham, who also had become an analyst, outlined a program of service and research to prevent further harm to the children, conduct research on the fundamental needs of children, and develop an ideal nursery environment that could provide a model for peacetime education. A fundamental conclusion from these works was that separation from family could have a more detrimental effect than the war itself.

Freud consistently sought to apply the theories of psychoanalysis to the practical problems of children. The children of the war nurseries included the blind, handicapped, and deprived as well as those troubled by minor problems. Her observations convinced her of the importance of the parental bond to both normal and abnormal childhood development. The immediate effect of the nurseries was to shift childcare policy in favor of supporting children in their families rather than sending them away to institutions. She also initiated a form of core training for the war nurseries staff.

Others were also applying psychoanalysis to the treatment of children at this time, but a number of major differences soon emerged after Freud's arrival in England. A lifelong rift developed in the British Psychanalytic Society between Freud and Melanie Klein, who believed that techniques could be equally applied to children and adults. Freud held, however, that analysis of children must make allowances for children's unique developmental stages and fluid individuality. She believed in a reality-based and practical application of educational devices for both parents and children. She also disagreed that child analysis was beneficial to all children, and she objected to over-interpretation of children's movement and expression in play as signs of underlying conflict. Freud argued instead that a wide range of behavior could be considered "normal" and relied, more heavily than her counterparts, on direct observation and on the clues provided by children's drawings, play, and daydreams.

Like her father, Freud believed that analysis was essentially a talking cure, and children could not therefore be analyzed until they could talk. Children cannot be trusted to control the impulses set free by analysis, she argued; they must be controlled by the parents or by the analyst acting as "auxiliary ego." Child analysis, Freud concluded, aims to strike a balance between freeing and restricting the child's impulses in the process of educating them. And no therapy of children can succeed without parental support. With her practical focus and humanistic outlook, Freud played a major part in maintaining unity among British psychoanalysts who often held widely differing points of view.

The nurseries were succeeded in 1947 by the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic, which she founded with a number of other prominent analysts. It would become the world's largest and most comprehensive child analytic training and treatment center. It provided analytic therapy, counseling, and a renowned training course for many American child psychologists and other practitioners and served as a model for similar centers throughout the world. For the next 40 years, Freud served as a training analyst, supervisor, and consultant to the clinic while speaking internationally and publishing on a wide variety of subjects. Freud continued her collaborations with pediatricians, social workers, and teachers, combining models of service to children with rigorous scientific investigation.

In the early 1960s, Freud began a collaboration with the Yale Child Study Center, contributing to seminars on family law and child placement conflicts. In the resulting books, Freud argued that the child's perspective must be paramount in determining child care decisions and that the "least detrimental alternative" should be pursued that will allow the child to maintain a stable parental relationship. She also argued for minimizing the state's intrusion into family life. In her final years, she extended this work to examining the uses and misuses of experts in resolving custody and placement conflicts.

In her final years, Freud believed the future of psychoanalysis lay in examining each developmental path that led to adulthood. Instead of seeking the origin of disturbances in earliest life, she proposed a number of "developmental lines" of normal development in which disturbance could occur. Psychic disturbance, she believed, may have many origins and take forms in childhood and adulthood which are not necessarily causally related or even similar. A later major work, Normality and Pathology in Childhood, focused on assessing childhood developmental stages and establishing norms for childhood development.

Freud came to believe that modern analysis had wrongly shifted attention from unearthing repressed past childhood experiences to dealing solely with the patient's present relations with the therapist. She also disagreed with the modern shift from a father-centered to mother-centered approach. When asked about her views on the subject of mothering, Freud replied that she had never written of mother-daughter relations because she knew nothing about them. A striking irony of her life was that she never married or had children of her own; and in spite of her lifelong dedication to the care of children, she refused to be identified as a universal mother figure.

Although Freud never acquired advanced academic degrees, her accomplishments were widely recognized in the many honorary degrees awarded her in England, Europe, and the United States. As the last link to the origins of psychoanalysis, she embraced her father's ideas while forging her own theories of normal and abnormal child development and psychology and creating a coherent therapeutic technique. Freud suffered a stroke in 1982 and died later that year. Clifford Yorke, a fellow psychoanalyst, wrote that her death "brought to a close the distinguished career of one of the great scientific leaders of our time, and one whose impact and influence will continue to be felt as long as a science of the mind survives."

Further Reading

Coles, Robert, Anna Freud: The Dream of Psychoanalysis, Addison-Wesley, 1991.

Freud, Anna, Writings of Anna Freud [8 volumes], International Universities Press, 1964-1980

Peters, Uwe H., Anna Freud: A Life Dedicated to Children, Schocken Books, 1985.

Sayer, Janet, Mothers of Psychoanalysis: Helene Deutch, Karen Horney, Anna Freud, and Melanie Klein, Norton, 1991.

Young-Bruehl, Elizabeth, Anna Freud: A Biography, Norton, 1994.

Women in Psychology: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book, edited by Agnes N. O'Connell and Nancy F. Russo, Greenwood, 1990.

American Journal of Psychiatry, December 1983, p. 1632; May 1995, p. 784.

American Psychologist, February 1985, p. 230.

Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatrists, 1984, p. 233

London Times, October 11, 1982, p. 12.

Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1984, p. 31.

FREUD, ANNA (1895-1982)

Psychoanalyst and pioneer in child analysis, Anna Freud was born on December 3, 1895, in Vienna, and died on October 9, 1982, in London.

Anna Freud was Sigmund and Martha Freud's third daughter and sixth and last child. When she was a year old, Martha's sister Minna joined the family. The two women had carefully defined roles, but a warm and affectionate Catholic nursemaid, Josefine Cihlarz, to whom Anna felt very close, took a very active part in the upbringing of the three youngest children. The children were treated leniently but firmly: disciplined behavior and punctuality were emphasized and expected. Anna Freud displayed these traits throughout her life. Her love of animals may, in part, have reflected Josefine's influence.

She started elementary school at six, and at ten entered the Salka Goldman Cottage Lyceum for girls. She read widely and wrote poetry. Her remarkable memory was a major asset at school and throughout her life; later, as a psychoanalyst, she never forgot the details of any case reported to her, and could make telling use of them in clinical discussion.

She was on holiday in England when war broke out in 1914. Now an enemy alien, she managed to return to Austria with the Ambassador and his entourage, traveling by an adventurous route. She trained as an elementary school teacher at the Lyceum, and her industry and rare intelligence ensured her appointment to the teaching staff.

She was always a wonderful teacher, but her interest in psychoanalysis was evident in early adolescence. She became Librarian of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Association, and was analyzed by her father—unthinkable perhaps nowadays, but not such a rare event at this time. She read her first paper (on beating fantasies) to the Association in 1922, and was thereby granted membership.

Her teaching experience served her well as a pioneer in child analysis. Melanie Klein was already analyzing children in Berlin; but the two leaders in the field used children's play differently in their techniques. Anna Freud disputed Klein's belief that play was the child's equivalent of free association in adults, but this was only one of many later differences. Klein went to England in 1927 and became a powerful influence in the British Society. Disparities of view between the Viennese and British Societies became pronounced, initially on the basis of child analytic practice.

Anna Freud's new ideas, charm, and lifelong capacity for winning collaborators quickly secured her a large following. Her seminars in Vienna attracted colleagues from Prague and Budapest. A wide range of disorders were treated and discussed, but Anna Freud's attention to normal development matched her interest in pathology. She believed it was impossible to understand the one without the other. She applied her growing knowledge to the field of education and gave lectures to teachers and parents. With her friend and colleague Dorothy Burlingham, she set up what she called "a cross between a crèche and a nursery school," financed by the wealthy psychoanalyst Edith Jackson, for the poorest children in Vienna who were given both bodily and psychological care. These experiences fuelled Anna Freud's interest in the psychological consequences and concomitants of physical illness and laid a foundation for her interest in pediatric practice.

Her work with adults fostered her need to know more about psychiatry and she attended, on a regular basis, ward-rounds at the University's Psychiatric Clinic, headed by Wagner-Jauregg, the Nobel Prize winner, and staffed by Paul Schilder and Heinz Hartmann. She retained this interest for the rest of her life.

Earlier publications were followed by her first book in 1936, appearing one year later in English as The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. This major work was the first to distinguish between recognized defenses against instinctual drive derivatives and defenses against painful affects, newly observed and described by her.

The Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, and Princess Marie Bonaparte and Ernest Jones together secured safe transfer to London for the Freud family and a number of associates. Freud, Anna, and other psychoanalysts were admitted to the British Psycho-Analytical Society. Though well received, clinical and theoretical differences between the two groups were pronounced and culminated in a series of controversial discussions between 1941 and 1945. The disagreements were beyond resolution, and two parallel training courses were set up in recognition of this fact.

Freud died in 1939 from the cancer of the jaw that had plagued him for fourteen years, and Anna Freud was his devoted nurse. She continued to support the principles behind his psychoanalytic thinking, but she had a highly original mind and never followed him slavishly. After the outbreak of war, the predicament of children made homeless through bombing led her to establish, with Dorothy Burlingham, the Hampstead War Nurseries. Careful observations and meticulous records, made with the help of staff who rarely left the premises, vastly increased existing knowledge of child development and problems of residential care. The findings are collected by Anna and Dorothy in Young Children In Wartime (1942) and Infants Without Families (1944).

In 1947 Anna Freud founded a course in child analysis, and in 1952 established the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic. With these unequalled facilities clinical research expanded substantially. In this Anna Freud's charm and authority served her unsurpassed capacity to draw staff and students into the work and make substantial contributions. She herself continued to publish major papers, but her most important book was Normality and Pathology of Childhood (1965). Her writing continued apace, with major contributions to psychoanalytic diagnosis and to clinical and theoretical understanding of a wide range of developmental problems and disturbances. Her work in the fields of education, pediatrics, and family law (Beyond the Best Interests of the Child ), in which she collaborated with Professors Albert J. Solnit and Joseph Goldstein from Yale University, won her wide recognition within those disciplines. She received many honors and was appointed Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1967. Of her many honorary degrees, she was especially proud of the MD from the University of Vienna (1975) and the PhD from the Goethe Institute in Frankfurt (1981) where, half a century earlier, her father had been awarded the Goethe prize for literature.

By this time Anna Freud was seriously ill with an advanced anemia of old age, but her mind remained clear and active throughout the slow physical deterioration that led to her death. Her ashes were placed next to her father's at Golders Green crematorium in London.

Clifford Yorke

Work discussed: Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, The.

See also: Abandonment; Adaptation; Adolescent crisis; Altruism; Andreas-Salomé, Louise (Lou); Austria; Berggasse 19, Wien IX; British Psycho-Analytical Society; Burlingham-Rosenfeld/Hietzing Schule; Burlingham-Tiffany, Dorothy; Childhood; Children's play; Child psychoanalysis; Controversial Discussions; Defense; Ego (ego psychology); Externalization-internalization; First World War: The effect on the development of psychoanalysis; Freud-Bernays, Martha; Freud Museum; Freud, the Secret Passion ; Lay analysis; Gesammelte Schriften ; Gesammelte Werke ; Gestapo; Goethe (prize); Great Britain; Hampstead Clinic; Hogarth Press; Identification with the aggressor; Imago. Zeitschrift für die Anwendung der Psychoanalyse auf die Geisteswissenschaften ; Infantile neurosis; Lehrinstitut der Wiener psychoanalytischen Vereinigung; Masochism; Negative transference; Neutrality/benevolent neutrality; Phobias in children; Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, The ; Second World War: The effect on the development of psychoanalysis; Sigmund Freud Archives; Sigmund Freud Copyrights Limited; Sigmund Freud Museum; Splits in psychoanalysis; Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud ; Telepathy; Transference in children; Unconscious fantasy; Wiener psychoanalytische Vereinigung.

Bibliography

Freud, Anna. (1936). Collected writings. New York: International Universities Press.

——. (1968). Acting out. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 49.

——. (1977). Fears, anxieties, and phobic phenomena. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 32, 85-90.

——. (1979). Personal memories of Ernest Jones. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 60, 285-287.

——. (1980). Introduction. In Sigmund Freud: The analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.

——. (1981). Insight. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 36, 241-250.

Goldstein, Joseph; Freud, Anna; and Solnit, Albert J. (1973). Beyond the best interests of the child. New York: The Free Press.

Freud, Anna (1895–1982)

Anna Freud, the youngest child of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, was born and raised in Vienna, Austria, where she trained as an elementary school teacher and psychoanalyst. After being psychoanalyzed by her father, she became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1922. Freud never married; she lived with a lifelong companion: the American Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, whose children she psychoanalyzed. She worked as her father's scientific and administrative guardian, and she also made significant contributions to the technique of child analysis, theories of child development, and ego psychology.

Anna Freud published the first book on child psychoanalysis in 1926. Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis combined her pedagogical experience with psychoanalytical insight and described an approach aimed at strengthening the child's ego. The book also criticized the techniques of British child analyst Melanie Klein. Freud saw Klein's methods as a dangerous probing of the child's unconscious fantasy life; this criticism led to a 1927 debate between Freud and Klein about child analysis. Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense appeared in 1936. This classic work systematically explained her father's concept of the ego and forged her reputation as a pioneer of ego psychology, a theory which dominated American psychoanalysis throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

Through the late 1920s and the 1930s, Freud served as Secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association and Chair of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. When Germany invaded Austria in 1938, the Freud family emigrated to London and Anna Freud became a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. There she participated in a second debate with Klein and her followers about whether Klein's ideas were truly Freudian. These controversial discussions ended with the organization of separate Freudian and Kleinian training programs within the society.

Freud set up the Hampstead War Nurseries in 1940, where she conducted observational research on orphaned children described in her 1944 book Infants Without Families: The Case For and Against Residential Nurseries. The nurseries closed in 1945 but later were reincarnated as the renowned Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic, posthumously renamed The Anna Freud Center for the Psychoanalytic Study and Treatment of Children. Over the next few decades Freud analyzed many young patients, trained future child analysts, and focused her research on developing ways to assess the relative normality or pathology of children at different ages, which she published in her 1965 work Normality and Pathology in Childhood.

Freud's later work also involved the practical application of psychoanalysis to problems in education and child welfare, and she lectured to public audiences on diverse topics ranging from child-rearing to family law. In 1961 she joined the faculty of Yale Law School as Senior Fellow and Visiting Lecturer. She collaborated with Yale colleagues Joseph Goldstein and Albert Solnit on the influential 1973 book Beyond the Best Interests of the Child. Followed by two similar volumes, this book helped establish social and legal rights for children in America.

Anna Freud continued to research and lecture until she died from the effects of a stroke in 1982. Her papers were placed with the Freud Archives in the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C.

See also: Age and Development; Child Development, History of the Concept of; Child Psychology.

bibliography

King, Pearl, and Ricardo Steiner, eds. 1991. The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941–1945. London: Routledge.

Sandler, Joseph, and Anna Freud. 1980. The Technique of Child Psychoanalysis: Discussions with Anna Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sandler, Joseph, and Anna Freud. 1985. The Analysis of Defense: The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense Revisited. New York: International Universities Press.

Young-Bruehl, Elizabeth. 1988. Anna Freud: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Gail Donaldson

FREUD, ANNA

FREUD, ANNA (1895–1982), psychoanalyst. Anna Freud was the youngest daughter of Sigmund *Freud, and was his companion on his vacation trips and his nurse during his prolonged illnesses. Her devotion to her father brought her into increasing contact with the developing thought and practice of psychoanalysis and she grew interested in child psychology. Between 1915 and 1920 she worked in her profession as a primary school teacher, deepened her knowledge in psychoanalysis, and started analysis as her father's patient. At the age of 28 she opened her own psychoanalytic practice, right across Sigmund Freud's treatment room in Berggasse 19. In 1927 she published a paper Einfuehrung in die Technik der Kinderanalyse (Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis, 1928), in which she set out the analytical technique she had evolved. In 1936 she published Das Ich und die Abwehrmechanismen (The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, 1937) which described the ways by which painful ideas and emotions are warded off from consciousness and direct expression, e.g., by repression and replacement by the opposite idea. This book was a pioneer contribution to ego psychology and in understanding the adolescent.

She escaped from Austria with her father in 1938 and went with him to London, where Sigmund Freud died in 1939 and she continued to live until the end of her life. During World War ii, together with her friend Dorothy Burlingham, she built up the Hampstead nurseries, where they took care of children separated from their families. In three books the two colleagues documented their experiences there, describing the treatment of children under conditions of war stress. They also described the development of children from narcissism to socialization, and set out the problems in the emotional life of institutional children despite their receiving advantages in physical care. These books were Young Children in Wartime (1942); Infants without Families (1943); and Warand Children (1943).

The Hampstead nurseries closed in 1945. In 1947, with the help of Kate *Friedlander, Freud founded the Child Therapy Course. In 1951 she became director of the clinic which was opened in conjunction with the course. Freud's book Normality and Pathology in Childhood (1965) is a comprehensive summation of her thought. Freud's contribution to child analytic therapy and child psychology was fundamental. She was able to demonstrate the validity of the reconstructions made by Sigmund Freud of child development and pathology through his analysis of adults. Moreover she was able to add considerably to the information by her methods of direct observation of children. Of special interest was her employment of psychological understanding in the education of children and in preventive work with the child through its parents and educators. Her contribution to the knowledge of the reaction of young children separated from their parents and deprived of emotional relationships, particularly in institutions, has had a wide effect in social policy and direct child care. From 1968 her collected works appeared under the title The Writings of Anna Freud.

bibliography:

E. Pumpian-Mindlin, in: F. Alexander, et al. (eds.), Psychoanalytic Pioneers (1966), 519–33; Sandler, in: J.G. Howells (ed.), Modern Perspectives in Child Psychiatry (1965), includes bibliography, 250f. add. bibliography: E. Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud: a biography (1989); U. Henrik Peters, "Anna Freud," in: H.J. Schultz (ed.), Es ist ein Weinen in der Welt (1990); R. Coles, Anna Freud: The Dream of Psychoanalysis (1992); W. Salber, Sigmund und Anna Freud (1999); R. Edgecumbe, Anna Freud: a View of Development, Disturbance and Therapeutic Techniques (2000); D.A. Rothe (ed.), "… als käm ich heim zu Vater und Schwester": Lou Andreas-Salomé–Anna Freud Briefwechsel 1919–1937 (2004).

[Louis Miller /

Mirjam Triendl (2^nd ed.)]