The youngest Freud
Anna Freud was born in Vienna on December 3, 1895, the sixth and youngest child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays, in a Jewish family living in comfortable middle-class circumstances at Berggasse 19. She was a lively, mischievous child; her father wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in 1899 that she had become “downright beautiful through naughtiness.” She was never close to her mother and was largely cared for by the family’s Catholic nurse, and she grew up in the shadow of her elder sister Sophie, the two dividing the territories of “beauty” and “brains” between them.
From adolescence she was fascinated by her father’s work and was allowed to sit in on the meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society he held at home. She attended the Cottage Lyceum, a girls’ secondary school, and, inspired by the stream of foreign visitors to the household, learned English and French and some Italian.
Teacher and analyst-in-training
In 1914, at eighteen, Anna travelled alone to England to improve her English and was there when the First World War broke out, making her an “enemy alien”; she returned to Vienna via Gibraltar and Genoa with the Austro-Hungarian ambassador’s party. That year she passed her teaching examination and began teaching at her old school, where her superiors praised her “gift for teaching.” In 1919 she volunteered at the Baumgarten Children’s Home, which cared for Jewish war orphans in Vienna. Tuberculosis, contracted in 1918, and recurring illness forced her to give up teaching in 1920.
Meanwhile she had immersed herself in psychoanalysis. She translated papers for the Vienna society, attended her father’s university lectures in 1916 and 1917, and in October 1918 began an analysis with him, an arrangement that would be unthinkable today. In 1922 she presented her first paper, “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams” and became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society. When her father was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw in 1923, she became his nurse, secretary and representative, reading his papers at congresses he could no longer attend.
Pioneer of child analysis
In 1923 Anna Freud began her own practice analysing children, and by 1925 she was teaching child analysis at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute. Her first book, Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis (1927), argued that children could not be analysed exactly like adults: a young child’s ego was still developing, the analyst was inevitably also an educator, and the work had to be adapted to the child’s stage of growth. Her ideas clashed sharply with those of Melanie Klein, who interpreted the play of even very young children as a direct route to their unconscious.
Among her first patients were the children of Dorothy Burlingham, an American heiress of the Tiffany family who arrived in Vienna in 1925. Burlingham became Anna’s closest companion for the rest of her life; the two set up home together and collaborated in all their later work. In 1927, with their friend Eva Rosenfeld, they founded a small progressive school in Vienna’s Hietzing district, where the young Erik Erikson and Peter Blos taught. From 1925 to 1934 Anna also served as secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and in 1935 she became director of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute.
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence
In 1936 Anna Freud published her most influential book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. Where her father had focused on the hidden drives of the unconscious, she studied the ego, the part of the mind that deals with reality, and the ways it protects itself from anxiety and unpleasant feelings. She systematically described defence mechanisms such as repression, denial, projection, regression and “identification with the aggressor” as well as the intellectualisation and asceticism she saw in adolescents.
The book became a founding text of ego psychology, the school that dominated psychoanalysis in the United States for decades, and its vocabulary passed into everyday language. People who have never read a word of psychoanalysis speak of someone being “in denial” or “projecting” ideas that Anna Freud did more than anyone to define.
In 1937, funded by the American Edith Jackson, she and Burlingham opened the Jackson Nursery for toddlers from poor Viennese families, where they observed infants closely and allowed them to choose their own food and organise their own play. It was the start of a lifelong commitment to direct observation of children.
Escape from Vienna
In March 1938 Nazi Germany annexed Austria, and the Freuds, as Jews and as the family of the founder of a “Jewish science” were in grave danger. The Jackson Nursery was closed. Anna was taken to Gestapo headquarters and interrogated about the International Psychoanalytical Association. Unknown to her father, she and her brother Martin had obtained enough of the sedative Veronal from the family doctor, Max Schur, to take their own lives if faced with torture or internment. She survived the interrogation and was allowed to return home.
With help from Ernest Jones and Princess Marie Bonaparte, it was Anna above all who dealt with the Nazi bureaucracy and organised the family’s emigration. In 1938 they reached London and settled at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead. “England is indeed a civilized country” she wrote, “and I am naturally grateful that we are here.” Sigmund Freud died there in September 1939, weeks after the outbreak of war. Four of his sisters, who had remained in Vienna, were later murdered in the Holocaust.
War nurseries and child survivors
In London Anna Freud rebuilt her practice, lecturing on child psychology in English. In January 1941 she and Burlingham opened the Hampstead War Nurseries for children whose families had been broken up by the Blitz, with houses in Hampstead and in Essex that cared for more than eighty children. Mothers were encouraged to visit as often as possible, and the staff tried to give each child continuity of care from the same adults. Their observations, published in Young Children in War-Time and Infants Without Families, showed how much separation from parents harmed small children, and influenced thinking about children in hospitals and institutions for decades.
After the war a group of young Jewish orphans who had survived the Theresienstadt ghetto came into the care of her colleagues at the Bulldogs Bank home in England. In her paper “An Experiment in Group Upbringing” written with Sophie Dann, Anna described how these children, deprived of parents, had formed intense, protective attachments to one another, a landmark study in the psychology of trauma.
During the war years her conflict with Melanie Klein threatened to split the British Psycho-Analytical Society. The “Controversial Discussions” of 1942–44 ended in a compromise, with parallel training courses for the Kleinians, Anna Freud’s followers and an independent middle group.
The Hampstead Clinic
In 1947 Anna Freud and the analyst Kate Friedlander established the Hampstead Child Therapy Course, and in 1952 a clinic was added. The Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic became a world centre for treating children, training child therapists and researching child development. There she developed the idea of “developmental lines” charting a child’s normal growth from dependency to emotional self-reliance, and diagnostic profiles that helped clinicians see where a child’s development had gone off course. Her book Normality and Pathology in Childhood (1965) gathered this work together.
From the 1950s she travelled regularly to the United States to lecture and raise funds. At Yale Law School she taught seminars on the family and the law, collaborating with Joseph Goldstein and Albert Solnit on Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973) and its sequels, which shaped how courts weigh children’s needs in custody and adoption cases, including the importance of continuity in a child’s relationships.
Honours and last years
Anna Freud became a British subject in 1946. She received a long series of honorary doctorates, from Clark University in 1950, where her father had lectured in 1909, to Harvard in 1980. In 1967 she was appointed CBE, and in 1972, a year after her first post-war return to her native city, the University of Vienna gave her an honorary medical doctorate. She was made honorary president of the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1973. She once said that the speeches about her achievements made her feel as if she were already dead.
The 1970s brought many losses, including the deaths of her brother Ernst and of two of Dorothy Burlingham’s children, whom she had analysed. Anna Freud died in London on October 9, 1982, aged eighty-six. Her ashes were placed at Golders Green Crematorium beside her parents’ ancient Greek urn.
Legacy
After her death the Hampstead Clinic was renamed the Anna Freud Centre; today, as the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families, it is a leading British charity for children’s mental health, working closely with University College London. In 1986, as she had wished, her home at Maresfield Gardens became the Freud Museum.
Anna Freud carried psychoanalysis out of the consulting room and into nurseries, schools, hospitals and courts. Her insistence on watching real children and understanding their development, her account of how the mind defends itself, and her work with children uprooted by war and genocide made her one of the founders of modern child psychology. The Jewish refugee from Vienna who said she had simply spent her life with children helped change how the world cares for them.
Sources & further reading
Anna Freud, Wikipedia · Anna Freud, Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, Jewish Women’s Archive · Our history, Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.