- Person
- Anna Freud
- Lived
- 1895–1982
- Field
- Child psychoanalysis
- From
- Austrian-British
The story
Anna Freud reached London in June 1938 as a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, settling with her family at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead. Her father, Sigmund Freud, died the following year. When the Blitz began in September 1940, many London children lost their homes, and some were left with one parent or none. Anna Freud and her friend Dorothy Burlingham decided to turn their expertise to helping the youngest victims.
With money from friends they planned a nursery, and in January 1941 they opened a Children's Rest Centre at 13 Wedderburn Road in Hampstead. Most of the first children came from the heavily bombed East End. Further funding came from the American charity Foster Parents Plan for War Children, which asked for monthly reports; the first recorded 25 children aged from six months to nine years. The model came from the Jackson Nursery the two women had run in Vienna, and several of its staff, refugees themselves, joined them in London.
The work grew quickly. In June 1941 a second residential nursery for babies and toddlers opened at 5 Netherhall Gardens, and in August a country house at New Barn, Lindsell, in Essex took in children evacuated from the city. The Jewish Women's Archive says the nurseries provided foster care for more than eighty children, and the Anna Freud Centre describes them as a refuge for hundreds made homeless by the bombing.
Anna Freud tried to help the children form secure attachments by keeping the same carers with them and by encouraging mothers to visit as often as possible. Staff received regular training in psychoanalytic theory, and their detailed observations became research. She and Burlingham published studies of the children under stress, including Young Children in War-Time and Infants Without Families, which examined how young children react to separation and how they find substitute affection among their peers. A complete set of the monthly reports was published in 1974.
The nurseries closed in 1945, but their lessons shaped the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic that Anna Freud went on to found, and they informed later thinking about how to care for children separated from their families.
Why it matters
The War Nurseries sheltered vulnerable children through the Blitz and produced pioneering research on how separation and stress affect young children.
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 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 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
- Anna Freud Wikipedia
- Hampstead War Nurseries Wikipedia
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