Anna Freud was the 6th and last child of
Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. She
followed the path of her father and
contributed to the field of
psychoanalysis.
Alongside Melanie Klein, she may be
considered the founder of psychoanalytic
child psychology: as her father put it,
child analysis "had received a powerful
impetus through 'the work of Frau
Melanie Klein and of my daughter, Anna
Freud.'" Compared to her father, her
work emphasized the importance of the
ego and its ability to be trained
socially. A Review of General Psychology
survey, published in 2002, ranked Freud
as the 99th most cited psychologist of
the 20th century.
Life and career
= Vienna years=
Anna Freud was born in Vienna,
Austria-Hungary on the 3rd of December
1895.Anna Freud appears to have had a
comparatively unhappy childhood, in
which she 'never made a close or
pleasurable relationship with her
mother, and was instead nurtured by
their Catholic nurse Josephine'. She had
difficulties getting along with her
siblings, specifically with her sister
Sophie Freud. Sophie, who was the more
attractive child, represented a threat
in the struggle for the affection of
their father: 'the two young Freuds
developed their version of a common
sisterly division of territories:
"beauty" and "brains"', and their father
once spoke of her 'age-old jealousy of
Sophie'.
As well as this rivalry between the two
sisters, Anna had other difficulties
growing up – 'a somewhat troubled
youngster who complained to her father
in candid letters how all sorts of
unreasonable thoughts and feelings
plagued her'. It seems that 'in general,
she was relentlessly competitive with
her siblings...and was repeatedly sent
to health farms for thorough rest,
salutary walks, and some extra pounds to
fill out her all too slender shape': she
may have suffered from a depression
which caused eating disorders. The close
relationship between Anna and her father
was different from the rest of her
family. She was a lively child with a
reputation for mischief. Freud wrote to
his friend Wilhelm Fliess in 1899: 'Anna
has become downright beautiful through
naughtiness'. Freud is said to refer to
her in his diaries more than others in
the family .
Later on Anna Freud would say that she
didn’t learn much in school; instead she
learned from her father and his guests
at home. This was how she picked up
Hebrew, German, English, French and
Italian. At the age of 15, she started
reading her father’s work and discovered
a dream she had 'at the age of nineteen
months...appeared in The Interpretation
of Dreams. Commentators have noted how
'in the dream of little Anna...little
Anna only hallucinates forbidden
objects'. Anna finished her education at
the Cottage Lyceum in Vienna in 1912.
Suffering from a depression and
anorexia, she was very insecure about
what to do in the future. Subsequently,
she went to Italy to stay with her
grandmother, and there is evidence that
'In 1914 she travelled alone to England
to improve her English', but was forced
to leave shortly after arriving because
war was declared.
In 1914 she passed the test to work as a
teaching apprentice at her old school,
the Cottage Lyceum. From 1915 to 1917,
she worked as a teaching apprentice for
third, fourth, and fifth graders. For
the school year 1917-18, she began ‘her
first venture as Klassenlehrerin for the
second grade’. For her performance
during the school years 1915-18 she was
highly praised by her superior, Salka
Goldman who ‘wrote…she showed “great
zeal “for all her responsibilities, but
she was particularly appreciated for her
“conscientious preparations” and for her
“gift for teaching”….being such a
success that she was invited to stay on
with a regular four-year contract
starting in the fall of 1918’.
She finally quit her teaching career in
1920, due to multiple episodes of
illness.
Analysis
Her first analysis was conducted by her
father Sigmund Freud from 1918 to 1922.
Jacques Van Rillaer describes this
"incestuous analysis".
She presented the paper "Beating
Fantasies and Daydreams" to the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Society, subsequently
becoming a member. In 1923, Anna Freud
began her own psychoanalytical practice
with children and two years later she
was teaching at the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Training Institute on the
technique of child analysis. From 1925
until 1934, she was the Secretary of the
International Psychoanalytical
Association while she continued child
analysis and seminars and conferences on
the subject.
In 1935, Freud became director of the
Vienna Psychoanalytical Training
Institute and in the following year she
published her influential study of the
"ways and means by which the ego wards
off displeasure and anxiety", The Ego
and the Mechanisms of Defence. It became
a founding work of ego psychology and
established Freud’s reputation as a
pioneering theoretician.
= London years=
In 1938 the Freuds had to flee from
Austria as a consequence of the Nazis'
intensifying harassment of Jews in
Vienna following the Anschluss by
Germany. Her father's health had
deteriorated due to jaw cancer, so Anna,
with the help of Ernest Jones, worked
out the immigration process for her
father and family. The Nazi army had
wanted to take Freud for interrogation,
but Anna offered herself instead. Before
she left, Freud placed in her daughter’s
hand a poison, a strategy to kill
herself in case they decided to torture
her. Anna was released, in unknown
circumstances, and the family emigrated
to London. Anna took care of Freud,
helping him with his medicine and
treatment, and continued her work. Freud
died in 1939.
Anna started to lecture on child
analysis in English. At that time in
London, the field of child analysis was
only being explored by Anna and Melanie
Klein, Anna's mentor. Anna’s arrival in
London resulted in splitting the school
of child analysis into three types:
Freudian, Kleinian and a combination of
the two approaches. The Kleinian
approached differed from the Freudian in
several methodological and theoretical
techniques around infancy and object
relationships. For example, the Freudian
approach did not believe that children
experienced superego, and their
therapist should be part of their
transference and significant figures. In
contrast, Klein believed that children
had superego, and needed to be treated
with the same techniques as adults.
These differences had initially
threatened the discipline of Anna’s
Freudian techniques of child analysis in
England, but by the end of World War II,
the conflict was resolved through
parallel acceptance for both movements.
The war gave Freud opportunity to
observe the effect of deprivation of
parental care on children. She set up a
centre for young war victims, called
"The Hampstead War Nursery". Here the
children got foster care although
mothers were encouraged to visit as
often as possible. The underlying idea
was to give children the opportunity to
form attachments by providing continuity
of relationships. This was continued,
after the war, at the Bulldogs Bank
Home, which was an orphanage, run by
colleagues of Freud, that took care of
children who survived concentration
camps. Based on these observations Anna
published a series of studies with her
long-time friend, Dorothy
Tiffany-Burlingham on the impact of
stress on children and the ability to
find substitute affections among peers
when parents cannot give them.
From the 1950s until the end of her life
Freud travelled regularly to the United
States to lecture, to teach and to visit
friends. She was elected a Foreign
Honorary Member of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences in 1959. During the
1970s she was concerned with the
problems of emotionally deprived and
socially disadvantaged children, and she
studied deviations and delays in
development. At Yale Law School, she
taught seminars on crime and the family:
this led to a transatlantic
collaboration with Joseph Goldstein and
Albert J. Solnit on children's needs and
the law, published in three volumes as
Beyond the Best Interests of the Child,
Before the Best Interests of the Child,
and In the Best Interests of the Child.
Freud died in London on 9 October 1982.
She was cremated at Golders Green
Crematorium and her ashes placed in a
marble shelf next to her parents'
ancient Greek funeral urn. Her lifelong
friend Dorothy Tiffany-Burlingham and
several other members of the Freud
family also rest there.
One year after Freud's death her
collected works were published. She was
described as "a passionate and
inspirational teacher" and in 1984 the
Hampstead Clinic was renamed the Anna
Freud Centre. In 1986 her London home of
forty years, as she had wished, was
transformed into the Freud Museum,
dedicated to her father and the British
Psychoanalytical Society.
Contributions to psychoanalysis
Anna Freud was a prolific writer,
contributing articles on psychoanalysis
to many different publications
throughout her lifetime. Her first
publication was titled, An Introduction
to Psychoanalysis: Lectures for Child
Analysts and Teachers 1922-1935, and was
the result of four different lectures
she was delivering at the time, to
teachers and caretakers of young
children in Vienna.
Anna Freud's first article Beating
fantasies and daydreams, ' drew in part
on her own inner life, but th[at]...made
her contribution no less scientific'. In
it she explained how 'Daydreaming, which
consciously may be designed to suppress
masturbation, is mainly unconsciously an
elaboration of the original masturbatory
fantasies'. Her father, Sigmund Freud,
had earlier covered very similar ground
in '"A Child is Being Beaten"' – 'they
both used material from her analysis as
clinical illustration in their sometimes
complementary papers' – in which he
highlighted a female case where 'an
elaborate superstructure of day-dreams,
which was of great significance for the
life of the person concerned, had grown
up over the masochistic
beating-phantasy...[one] which almost
rose to the level of a work of art'.
'Her views on child development, which
she expounded in 1927 in her first book,
An Introduction to the Technique of
Child Analysis, clashed with those of
Melanie Klein...[who] was departing from
the developmental schedule that Freud,
and his analyst daughter, found most
plausible'. In particular, Anna Freud's
belief that 'In children's analysis, the
transference plays a different role...
and the analyst not only "represents
mother" but is still an original second
mother in the life of the child' became
something of an orthodoxy over much of
the psychoanalytic world.
For her next major work in 1936, her
'classic monograph on ego psychology and
defense mechanisms, Anna Freud drew on
her own clinical experience, but relied
on her father's writings as the
principal and authoritative source of
her theoretical insights'. Here her
'cataloguing of regression, repression,
reaction formation, isolation, undoing,
projection, introjection, turning
against the self, reversal and
sublimation' helped establish the
importance of the ego functions and the
concept of defence mechanisms,
continuing the greater emphasis on the
ego of her father – 'We should like to
learn more about the ego' – during his
final decades.
Special attention was paid in it to
later childhood and adolescent
developments – 'I have always been more
attracted to the latency period than the
pre-Oedipal phases' – emphasising how
the 'increased intellectual, scientific,
and philosophical interests of this
period represent attempts at mastering
the drives'. The problem posed by
physiological maturation has been stated
forcefully by Anna Freud. "Aggressive
impulses are intensified to the point of
complete unruliness, hunger becomes
voracity... The reaction-formations,
which seemed to be firmly established in
the structure of the ego, threaten to
fall to pieces".
Selma Fraiberg's tribute of 1959 that
'The writings of Anna Freud on ego
psychology and her studies in early
child development have illuminated the
world of childhood for workers in the
most varied professions and have been
for me my introduction and most valuable
guide spoke at that time for most of
psychoanalysis outside the Kleinian
heartland.
Arguably, however, it was in Anna
Freud's London years 'that she wrote her
most distinguished psychoanalytic papers
– including "About Losing and Being
Lost", which everyone should read
regardless of their interest in
psychoanalysis'. Her description therein
of 'simultaneous urges to remain loyal
to the dead and to turn towards new ties
with the living' may perhaps reflect her
own mourning process after her father's
recent death.
Focusing thereafter on research,
observation and treatment of children,
Anna Freud established a group of
prominent child developmental analysts
who noticed that children's symptoms
were ultimately analogue to personality
disorders among adults and thus often
related to developmental stages. Her
book Normality and Pathology in
Childhood summarised 'the use of
developmental lines charting theoretical
normal growth "from dependency to
emotional self-reliance"'. Through these
then revolutionary ideas Anna provided
us with a comprehensive developmental
theory and the concept of developmental
lines, which combined her father's
important drive model with more recent
object relations theories emphasizing
the importance of parents in child
development processes.
Nevertheless, her basic loyalty to her
father's work remained unimpaired, and
it might indeed be said that 'she
devoted her life to protecting her
father's legacy... In her theoretical
work there would be little criticism of
him, and she would make what is still
the finest contribution to the
psychoanalytic understanding of
passivity', or what she termed
'altruistic surrender... excessive
concern and anxiety for the lives of his
love objects'.
Sigmund Freud biographer Louis Breger
observed that Anna Freud's publications
'contain few original ideas and are, for
the most part, a slavish application of
her father's theories.'
Jacques Lacan called 'Anna Freud the
plumb line of psychoanalysis. 'Well, the
plumb line doesn't make a building...
[but] it allows us to gauge the vertical
of certain problems.';
With psychoanalysis continuing to move
away from classical Freudianism to other
concerns, it may still be salutary to
heed Anna Freud's warning about the
potential loss of her father's 'emphasis
on conflict within the individual
person, the aims, ideas and ideals
battling with the drives to keep the
individual within a civilized community.
It has become modern to water this down
to every individual's longing for
perfect unity with his mother... There
is an enormous amount that gets lost
this way'.
Opinions on psychoanalysis
"Dear John ..., You asked me what I
consider essential personal qualities in
a future psychoanalyst. The answer is
comparatively simple. If you want to be
a real psychoanalyst you have to have a
great love of the truth, scientific
truth as well as personal truth, and you
have to place this appreciation of truth
higher than any discomfort at meeting
unpleasant facts, whether they belong to
the world outside or to your own inner
person.
Further, I think that a psychoanalyst
should have... interests... beyond the
limits of the medical field... in facts
that belong to sociology, religion,
literature, [and] history,...
[otherwise] his outlook on... his
patient will remain too narrow. This
point contains... the necessary
preparations beyond the requirements
made on candidates of psychoanalysis in
the institutes. You ought to be a great
reader and become acquainted with the
literature of many countries and
cultures. In the great literary figures
you will find people who know at least
as much of human nature as the
psychiatrists and psychologists try to
do.
Does that answer your question?"
In perhaps not dissimilar vein, she
wrote in 1954 that 'With due respect for
the necessary strictest handling and
interpretation of the transference, I
feel still that we should leave room
somewhere for the realization that
analyst and patient are also two real
people, of equal adult status, in a real
personal relationship to each other'.
Publications
Freud, Anna. The Writings of Anna Freud:
8 Volumes. New York: Indiana University
of Pennsylvania
Vol. 1. Introduction to Psychoanalysis:
Lectures for Child Analysts and Teachers
Vol. 2. Ego and the Mechanisms of
Defense;, 1968)
Vol. 3. Infants Without Families Reports
on the Hampstead Nurseries by Anna Freud
Vol. 4. Indications for Child Analysis
and Other Papers
Vol. 5. Research at the Hampstead
Child-Therapy Clinic and Other Papers:
Vol. 6. Normality and Pathology in
Childhood: Assessments of Development
Vol. 7. Problems of Psychoanalytic
Training, Diagnosis, and the Technique
of Therapy
Vol. 8. Psychoanalytic Psychology of
Normal Development
Freud in collaboration with Sophie Dann:
An Experiment in Group Upbringing, in:
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child,
VI, 1951. A group of six three-year-old
former Terezin children is observed as
regards group behavior, psychological
problems and adaption.
In popular culture
In 2002 Freud was honoured with a blue
plaque, by English Heritage, at 20
Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead in London,
her home between 1938 and 1982.
On 3 December 2014, Freud was the
subject of a Google Doodle.
The final track on the eponymous debut
album of indie-rock band The National is
titled "Anna Freud".
See also
The Century of the Self
References
Edmundson, M.. Freud and Anna. The
Chronicle of Higher Education, 54(4).
Retrieved from [1]
The Freud Museum.. Retrieved February
17, 2015, from
http:www.freud.org.uktopicanna-freud/
Fisher, C., & Lerner, R.. Encyclopedia
of Applied Developmental Science.
Thousands oaks, California: Sage
Publications.
Bibliography
Fenichel, Otto. The Psychoanalytic
Theory of Neurosis. London. ISBN
0203981588. 
Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life for Our Time.
London: J. M. Dent & Sons. ISBN
0-333-48638-2. 
Phillips, Adam. On Flirtation. London:
Harvard University Press. ISBN
0674634403. 
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Anna Freud: A
Biography. New York: Summit Books. ISBN
0-671-61696-X. 
Further reading
Coles, Robert. Anna Freud: The Dream of
Psychoanalysis. Reading, Mass.:
Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-57707-0. 
Peters, Uwe Henrik. Anna Freud: A Life
Dedicated to Children. New York:
Schocken Books. ISBN 0-8052-3910-3. 
Coffey, Rebecca. Hysterical: Anna
Freud's Story. New York: She Writes
Press. ISBN 9781938314421. 
External links
Anna Freud Centre
Life and Work of Anna Freud
International Psychoanalytical
Association
Biography of Anna Freud
Lost Girl by Doug Davis
Commentary on Freud's The Ego and the
Mechanisms of Defense from 50 Psychology
Classics
Anna Freud correspondence/ from the
Historic Psychiatry Collection,
Menninger Archives, Kansas Historical
Society]
Anna Freud Profile on Psychology's
Feminist Voices
