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