- Person
- Anna Freud
- Lived
- 1895–1982
- Field
- Child psychoanalysis
- From
- Austrian-British
The story
During the Second World War Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham ran the Hampstead War Nurseries in London, where they studied how young children coped with bombing and separation from their families. One theme kept appearing: when parents were absent, children could find substitute affection among their peers. After the war, the Jewish Women's Archive notes, she had a further opportunity to observe even more severe parental deprivation.
In 1945 a group of young Jewish orphans who had survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp arrived in Britain. They had lost their parents in the Holocaust. After the war, a home called Bulldogs Bank was set up for a group of these child survivors, run by colleagues of Anna Freud on lines similar to her wartime nurseries.
Anna Freud, working with her colleague Sophie Dann, studied how these children adjusted to their new lives. She wrote about their capacity to find substitute affections among their peers in the absence of their parents. The children's attachment to one another, formed under the most extreme conditions, became the central subject of the study, and it confirmed on a far more dramatic scale a pattern she had already seen in the bombed-out and separated children of wartime London.
The research was published in 1951 as An Experiment in Group Upbringing, in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, the journal Anna Freud had helped found in 1945 with her American colleagues Ruth Eissler, Heinz Hartmann and Ernst Kris, and which became the main home for her published work. The Anna Freud Centre calls it a landmark study. The Jewish Women's Archive describes it as an important article and notes that the war gave Anna Freud repeated opportunities to observe the effects of parental deprivation on children.
The study showed that the bonds children form with each other can sustain them even after terrible loss. Its findings became part of the wider body of research on separation and development that Anna Freud and her colleagues built up at the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic, which she founded in 1952, and they informed later thinking about how to care for orphaned, refugee and traumatised children.
Why it matters
The study deepened understanding of how traumatised children can heal through relationships, informing later work with refugee and orphaned 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 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.
Sources
- Our history Anna Freud Centre
- Anna Freud Jewish Women's Archive
- Anna Freud Wikipedia
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