- Person
- Anna Freud
- Lived
- 1895–1982
- Field
- Child psychoanalysis
- From
- Austrian-British
The story
By the mid-1930s Anna Freud was a leading figure in Vienna's psychoanalytic world. From the 1920s until 1934 she served as secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association, while running a child analysis practice, teaching seminars and nursing her father, Sigmund Freud, through his long illness with cancer. In 1935 she became director of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Training Institute, a sign of how open the young discipline was to women in senior roles.
In 1936 she published The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, a study of what she called the ways and means by which the ego wards off unpleasure and anxiety. Earlier psychoanalysis had concentrated on the instinctual drives. Anna Freud turned instead to the ego, the part of the mind that deals with reality, and to the defensive strategies people use to protect themselves from painful feelings.
Drawing on her clinical experience and her father's writings, she catalogued defences such as repression, regression, reaction formation, projection, introjection, turning against the self and sublimation. She added ideas of her own, including identification with the aggressor and altruistic surrender, in which a person sets aside their own wishes and lives through the wishes of others. She paid particular attention to children and adolescents, describing how the upheavals of adolescence can threaten defences that once seemed firmly established.
The book became a founding work of ego psychology and established her reputation as a pioneering theoretician in her own right. The Anna Freud Centre describes it as one of the most influential books in the history of psychoanalysis. In 1959 Selma Fraiberg wrote that Anna Freud's writings on ego psychology had illuminated the world of childhood for workers in many professions.
Two years after the book appeared, the Nazi takeover of Austria forced the Freud family to flee to London, where Anna Freud continued to develop these ideas through her work with children. Ideas she helped define, such as identification with the aggressor, remain part of the basic language of psychology and of the many professions that work with children.
Why it matters
Anna Freud's account of defence mechanisms gave clinicians, teachers and social workers a practical framework for understanding how people cope with stress and anxiety.
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 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 brought child psychology into family lawAt Yale Law School, Anna Freud worked with Joseph Goldstein and Albert Solnit on Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973), a book on children and the law.
- 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 Wikipedia
- Anna Freud Jewish Women's Archive
- Our history Anna Freud Centre
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