Anna Freud
Austrian-British psychoanalyst who worked with children
Austrian-born child psychoanalyst, daughter of Sigmund Freud. She wrote The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, ran the Hampstead War Nursery during the Second World War, and founded a child therapy clinic in London.
Why this person matters
Anna Freud developed psychoanalytic work with children and gave ego defence mechanisms a systematic description. Her wartime nursery with Dorothy Burlingham documented the effects of disruption on children, and her dispute with Melanie Klein divided British psychoanalysis.
Main contributions
Defence mechanisms and ego psychology
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (dated 1935 or 1936, depending on the source) named repression as the main defence mechanism and is described as a founding work of ego psychology.
Child analysis and clinical work
She began a psychoanalytic practice with children in 1923 and published An Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis in 1927. With Dorothy Burlingham she set up the Hampstead War Nursery in 1941 and the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic in 1952.
Developmental lines
Normality and Pathology in Childhood (1965) set out developmental lines, a way of charting normal growth in different areas of a child's functioning.
Context and limits
She disagreed with Melanie Klein over how to treat pre-Oedipal children, with Klein treating play as equivalent to free association and Anna Freud favouring educative intervention. The Controversial Discussions of 1941 to 1945 ended in a 1944 compromise of parallel training courses, and Psychology's Feminist Voices describes a lasting three-way division of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She trained as a teacher and never pursued doctoral training.
In your introductory course
Personality.Appears in the personality chapter for defence mechanisms such as repression and denial, and in development for child analysis.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 11.3. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1923
Began a psychoanalytic practice with children in Vienna.
- 1927
Published An Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis.
- 1941
Established the Hampstead War Nursery with Dorothy Burlingham.
- 1952
Founded the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic, later renamed the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families.
- 1965
Published Normality and Pathology in Childhood.
Sources
- Psychology's Feminist Voices, Anna FreudSociety or association. Institutional biography inspected.
- Wikipedia, Anna FreudReference work. Reference article inspected.