Anna Freud - The Vienna years, 1938 and later: Anna in London, Major contributions to psychoanalysis
Psychoanalyst, born in Vienna, Austria, the daughter of Sigmund Freud. She chaired the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and emigrated with her father to London in 1938, where she organized (19405) a residential war nursery for homeless children. She was a founder of child psychoanalysis.
Anna Freud (December 3, 1895 - October 9, 1982) was the sixth and last child of Sigmund and Martha Freud.
The Vienna years
Anna did not have a very close bond with her mother and had difficulties getting along with her siblings, specifically with her sister Sophie Freud. Apart from this rivalry between the two sisters, Anna had some other difficulties growing up. Out of correspondence between father and daughter, it can be concluded today that Anna suffered from a depression which caused eating disorders. The relationship between Anna and her father was different from the rest of her family;
Anna began school in 1901, later on Anna would say that she didn’t learn much in school but all the more from her father and his guests at home. Anna finished her education at the Cottage Lyceum in Vienna in 1912. In 1923 she 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. In 1935 Anna 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.
1938 and later: Anna in London
In 1938 the Freuds had to flee from Austria as a consequence of the Nazis' continuous harassment of Jews in Vienna. When Anna arrived in London, a conflict emerged between her and Melanie Klein regarding developmental theories of children.
The war gave Anna opportunity to observe the impact of deprivation of parental care on children. This was continued, after the war, at the Bulldogs Bank home, which was an orphanage, run by colleagues of Anna and was taking care of children who survive concentration camps. Based on these observations Anna published a series of studies with her lifelong friend, Dorothy Burlingham on the impact of stress on children and the ability to find substitute affections among peers when parents cannot give them.
In 1947 Anna Freud and Kate Friedlaender established the Hampstead Child Therapy Courses. Here they worked with Anna's theory of the developmental lines. Furthermore Anna started lecturing on child psychology.
From the 1950s until the end of her life Anna Freud travelled regularly to the United States to lecture, to teach and to visit friends. At Yale Law School she taught seminars on crime and the family: this led to a transatlantic collaboration with Joseph Goldstein and Albert Solnit on children and the law, published as Beyond the Best Interests of the Child(1973).
Anna Freud died in October 9, 1982. She was mentioned as "a passionate and inspirational teacher" and the Hampstead Clinic was renamed the Anna Freud Centre. Furthermore her home in London for forty years was in 1986, as she had wished, transformed into the Freud Museum, dedicated to her father and the psychoanalytical society.
Major contributions to psychoanalysis
Anna Freud moved away from the classical position of her father, who was concentrating on the unconscious Id (a perspective she found to be restrictive) and instead emphasized the importance of the ego, the constant struggle and conflict it is experiencing by the need to answer contradicting wishes, desires, values and demands of reality. Focusing on research, observation and treatment of children, Freud established a group of prominent child developmental analysts (which included Erik Erikson, Edith Jacobson and Margaret Mahler) who noticed that children's symptoms were ultimately analogue to personality disorders among adults and thus often related to developmental stages. At that time, these ideas were revolutionary and 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 of development, which emphasize the importance of parents in child development processes.
As such, the formation of the fields of child psychoanalysis and child developmental psychology can be attributed to Anna Freud. Anna Freud furthermore developed different techniques of assessment and treatment of children disorders, thereby contributing to our understanding of anxiety and depression as significant problems among children.
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