Anna Freud mapped how normal childhood unfolds

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

The story

After the Second World War Anna Freud focused on research, observation and treatment of children. At the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic in London, which she had founded in 1952, she gathered colleagues who noticed that children's symptoms were often tied to particular stages of development. For more than two decades she and her team observed children in many settings: the wartime nurseries, the clinic itself, a well-baby clinic, a nursery school, a nursery school for blind children and a mother-and-toddler group.

In 1965 she drew this material together in Normality and Pathology in Childhood, her major post-war book. At its heart was the idea of developmental lines, which charted a child's normal growth along several paths, such as the path from dependency to emotional self-reliance. Alongside them she proposed diagnostic profiles that allowed a clinician to see which parts of a child's development were on track and which had fallen behind or gone astray.

Her emphasis was on the ego and on the normal course of development, rather than only on illness. The approach combined her father's model of the drives with newer ideas about the importance of relationships, especially with parents, in a child's growth. These ideas, revolutionary at the time, gave clinicians a comprehensive theory of development.

The Jewish Women's Archive notes that the book was shaped by her work with children of all social backgrounds in peace and war. The Anna Freud Centre says it helped to establish the new field of developmental psychopathology, which studies how childhood difficulties arise in the context of normal development rather than in isolation from it.

The book later formed the sixth volume of her collected writings, published between 1966 and 1980. In the decades that followed, the clinic she founded went on to pioneer scientific studies of the outcomes of child therapy, building on the practice of careful assessment that the book had described. Thinking about children's difficulties in terms of development, rather than fixed labels, remains central to child mental health care.

Why it matters

Her developmental approach helps clinicians and teachers judge when a child needs support and what kind, by comparing each child with the normal course of growth.

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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