Anna Freud's 1927 book founded child psychoanalysis

Person: Anna Freud
Lived: 1895–1982
Field: Child psychoanalysis
From: Austrian-British

The story

Anna Freud, the youngest of the six children of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays, was born in Vienna in 1895 into a Jewish family. She trained first as a teacher at her old school, the Cottage Lyceum, and only later turned to psychoanalysis, the field her father had founded. Her serious study began in 1918, and in 1922 she presented her paper Beating Fantasies and Daydreams and became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society.

In 1923 she began her own psychoanalytic practice with children. Child analysis was then still relatively uncharted territory, explored by only a handful of pioneers. Among her first patients were the children of her friend Dorothy Burlingham, who had come to Vienna from New York with her four children. By 1925 Anna Freud was teaching a seminar on the technique of child analysis at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute.

In 1927 she published her approach as Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis, a series of lectures for teachers and parents. She argued that work with a child had to differ from work with an adult, and that the analyst played a special role in a child's life. Her views clashed with those of Melanie Klein, who was developing a different method, and the debate between their followers shaped child psychoanalysis for decades. Anna Freud's view of the child's relationship with the analyst became widely accepted across much of the psychoanalytic world.

The Jewish Women's Archive calls the book a seminal study that launched her career as one of the pioneers of child psychoanalysis, and the Anna Freud Centre says it created the foundation for direct therapeutic work with children. Alongside Hermine Hug-Hellmuth and Melanie Klein, she is regarded as a founder of psychoanalytic child psychology.

The book was the start of a lifetime of work. It led to her later studies of defence mechanisms, wartime nurseries and normal development, and to the Hampstead Clinic in London, today the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families.

Why it matters

Anna Freud's work made it possible to treat children's emotional difficulties directly, a cornerstone of modern child mental health care.

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.

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Anna Freud

1895–1982 · Child psychoanalysis

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