- Person
- Anna Freud
- Lived
- 1895–1982
- Field
- Child psychoanalysis
- From
- Austrian-British
The story
By the 1960s Anna Freud was one of the best-known child psychoanalysts in the world. A Jewish refugee from Vienna, she had settled in London in 1938 and built the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic into an international centre for the study and treatment of children. From the 1950s until the end of her life she travelled regularly to the United States to lecture, teach and visit friends, and it was there, the Jewish Women's Archive suggests, that she found perhaps the most eager audience for her ideas.
In 1961 she was invited to Yale Law School as a visiting lecturer, beginning a relationship with Yale University that the Anna Freud Centre says continues to this day. In the 1970s she became increasingly concerned with the problems of emotionally deprived and socially disadvantaged children, and she studied deviations and delays in their development.
At Yale she taught seminars on crime and the family. These led to a transatlantic collaboration with Joseph Goldstein and Albert J. Solnit on children's needs and the law. Their first book, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, was published in 1973. It set out to apply what clinicians had learned about children's emotional needs to the legal decisions that shape children's lives.
The partnership continued for years. The three authors followed the first book with Before the Best Interests of the Child in 1979, and a final volume, In the Best Interests of the Child, appeared in 1986, four years after Anna Freud's death. Her American visits also helped her raise funds for the Hampstead Clinic, including support from the National Institute of Mental Health.
The collaboration was part of what the Jewish Women's Archive calls her constant search for useful social applications of psychoanalysis, above all in treating, and learning from, children. Her honours spanned both sides of the Atlantic: a long series of honorary doctorates, from Clark University in 1950 to Harvard in 1980; a CBE in 1967; and in 1972 an honorary medical doctorate from the University of Vienna, in the city she had been forced to leave.
Why it matters
Anna Freud's collaboration with lawyers brought insights from child development into legal thinking about children, helping keep their real needs at the centre of decisions made about them.
About Anna Freud
Sigmund Freud’s youngest daughter, a refugee from Nazi Vienna who founded child psychoanalysis and ego psychology and built London’s Hampstead clinic for children in need.
More about Anna Freud
- Anna Freud's 1927 book founded child psychoanalysisAnna Freud's first book, Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis (1927), laid the foundation for direct therapeutic work with children.
- Anna Freud explained the mind's defence mechanismsIn 1936 Anna Freud published The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, a founding work of ego psychology and one of the most influential books in psychoanalysis.
- Anna Freud founded the Hampstead Child Therapy ClinicAnna Freud founded the Hampstead Child Therapy Course in 1947 and its clinic in 1952, training the first generation of child psychotherapists for Britain's NHS.
- Anna Freud mapped how normal childhood unfoldsAnna Freud's 1965 book Normality and Pathology in Childhood introduced developmental lines and helped establish the field of developmental psychopathology.
- Anna Freud cared for children made homeless by the BlitzFrom 1941 to 1945 Anna Freud ran the Hampstead War Nurseries in London, giving foster care to children whose homes and families had been disrupted by the war.
- Anna Freud opened a nursery for poor toddlers in ViennaIn 1937 Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham opened the Jackson Nursery in Vienna for children under two from impoverished families.
- Anna Freud began as a gifted teacher in ViennaBefore becoming an analyst, Anna Freud was praised for her gift for teaching; in 1927 she helped found a progressive school whose staff included Erik Erikson.
- Anna Freud studied child survivors of TheresienstadtAnna Freud's study of young orphans from the Theresienstadt camp, published in 1951, showed how children could find substitute affection among their peers.
Sources
- Anna Freud Jewish Women's Archive
- Our history Anna Freud Centre
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