- Person
- Anna Freud
- Lived
- 1895–1982
- Field
- Child psychoanalysis
- From
- Austrian-British
The story
Anna Freud was educated at the Cottage Lyceum, a secondary school for girls in Vienna, and her happy experience there led to her first choice of career: teaching. After leaving the school in 1912 she was unsure of her future, but in 1914 she passed her teaching examination and returned to the Lyceum as a teaching apprentice. From 1915 to 1917 she worked with pupils in the third, fourth and fifth grades.
For the school year 1917–18 she took on her first post as head teacher of a second-grade class. Her superior, Salka Goldman, praised her gift for teaching and offered her a regular four-year contract. But she contracted tuberculosis in 1918 and, after repeated illness, resigned her post in 1920. By then she had begun training in psychoanalysis. In 1919 she also volunteered at the Baumgarten Children's Home, which the Anna Freud Centre describes as a radical project that provided food, shelter and education for Jewish war orphans in Vienna.
She never lost her interest in education. In 1927 she, her friend Dorothy Burlingham and a family friend, Eva Rosenfeld, set up a small school in the Hietzing district of Vienna. Rosenfeld, who ran a foster home there, provided space in the grounds of her house, and Burlingham paid for the building and its equipment. The aim was to give children a psychoanalytically informed education, and Anna Freud taught there. Most pupils were in analysis themselves or were children of analysts or their patients.
Two young teachers who would become famous joined the staff at the start of their careers: Peter Blos and Erik Erikson, who also began a training analysis with Anna Freud. The school closed in 1932. The Anna Freud Centre says these Matchbox schools laid the foundation for her later work applying psychoanalytic theory to progressive education.
That link between teaching and therapy ran through her career. Her first book, in 1927, was a series of lectures for teachers and parents, and her later nurseries and clinic all combined care, education and research. Looking back, she said there was little to tell about her life: she had spent it with children.
Why it matters
Anna Freud's early teaching shaped a lifelong commitment to understanding and educating children, and helped bring insights from psychology into schools and nurseries.
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 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 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
- Our history Anna Freud Centre
- Anna Freud Jewish Women's Archive
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