Anna Freud (3 December 1895 – 9 October 1982) was
the sixth and last childThe family of Sigmund Freud, the famous psychoanalyst, left Austria and Germany in the 1930s and went to England and the United States. Several of Sigmund's descendants have become well-known in different fields....
of
SigmundSigmund Freud , Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology...
and Martha Freud. Born in
ViennaVienna is the capital of the Republic of Austria and also one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.7 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre. It is the 10th largest city by...
, she followed the path of her father and contributed to the newly born field of
psychoanalysisPsychoanalysis is a body of ideas developed by Austrian physician Sigmund Freud and continued by others. It is primarily devoted to the study of human psychological functioning and behavior, although it also can be applied to societies.
...
. With Melanie Klein, she is the cofounder of psychoanalytic child psychology. Compared to her father, her work emphasized the importance of the
egoego are the initials of an abstract poet named ernesto garcia orduna ...Ego is a Latin word meaning "I", cognate with the Greek "Εγώ " meaning "I" and may refer to:...
and its ability to be trained socially.
The Vienna years
Freud did not have a very close bond with her mother and had difficulties getting along with her
siblingA sibling is a brother or a sister; that is, any person who shares at least one of the same parents.In most societies throughout the world, siblings usually grow up together and spend a good deal of their childhood with each other. This genetic and physical closeness may be marked by the...
s, specifically with her sister, Sophie Freud. Freud also had troubles with her cousin Sonja Trierweiler. Trierweiler was a bad influence on her and caused many of the depressions she suffered. Her sister, Sophia who was the most attractive child, represented a threat in the struggle for the affection of their father. Apart from this rivalry between the two sisters, Freud had some other difficulties growing up. Out of correspondence between father and daughter, it can be concluded today that Freud suffered from a
depressionMajor depressive disorder is a mental disorder characterized by an all-encompassing low mood accompanied by low self-esteem, and loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities...
which caused
eating disorderAn eating disorder is a condition which affects an individuals eating habits, either as a result of their own doing , or as a bodily reaction to the consumption of food. Eating disorders can range from mild mental anguish to life-threatening conditions, and can affect every aspect of an...
s. The relationship between Freud and her father was different from the rest of
her familyThe family of Sigmund Freud, the famous psychoanalyst, left Austria and Germany in the 1930s and went to England and the United States. Several of Sigmund's descendants have become well-known in different fields....
; they were very close. She was a lively child with a reputation for mischief.
FreudSigmund Freud , Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology...
wrote to his friend
Wilhelm FliessWilhelm Fliess was a German otolaryngologist who practised in Berlin. On Josef Breuer's suggestion, Fliess attended several conferences of Sigmund Freud in 1887 in Vienna, and the two soon formed a strong friendship...
in 1899:
"Anna has become downright beautiful through naughtiness... ", Sigmund was very proud of his daughter. It was found that he mentioned her in his diaries more than others in the family.
Later on Freud would say that she didn’t learn much in school; instead she learned from her father and his guests at home. This was how she picked up
HebrewHebrew is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Culturally, it is considered a Jewish language. Hebrew in its modern form is spoken by more than seven million people in Israel while Classical Hebrew has been used for prayer or study in Jewish communities around the world for over...
,
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Around the world, German is spoken by approximately 105 million native speakers and also by...
,
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,...
,
FrenchFrench is a Romance language globally spoken by about 65 million people as a first language , by 50 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant speakers in 57 countries. Most native speakers of the language live in France,...
and
ItalianItalian is a Romance language spoken by about 60 million people in Italy, and by a total of around 70 million in the world. In Switzerland, Italian is one of four official languages. It is also the official language of San Marino, as well as the primary language of Vatican City...
. At the age of 15, she started reading her father’s work. At a young age she started to tell her father her dreams and he would publish them in his book
Interpretation of Dreams. Freud finished her education at the Cottage Lyceum in Vienna in 1912. Suffering from a depression, she was very insecure about what to do in the future. Subsequently, she went to
ItalyItaly , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares its northern, Alpine boundary with France, Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia...
to stay with her grandmother (conflicting documents state that at this time she took a trip to
EnglandEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
in hopes of improving her English, but was forced to leave shortly after arriving because war was declared).
In 1914, Freud started teaching at her old school, the Cottage Lyceum. In 1918, her father started
psychoanalysisPsychoanalysis is a body of ideas developed by Austrian physician Sigmund Freud and continued by others. It is primarily devoted to the study of human psychological functioning and behavior, although it also can be applied to societies.
...
on her and she became seriously involved with this new profession. Her analysis was completed in 1922 and thereupon she presented the paper
"Beating Fantasies and Daydreams" to the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, subsequently becoming a member. In 1923, Freud began her own psychoanalytical practice with children and two years later she was teaching at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute on the technique of child analysis. From 1925 until 1934, she was the Secretary of the
International Psychoanalytical AssociationThe International Psychoanalytical Association is an association including 12,000 psychoanalysts as members and works with 70 constituent organizations. It was founded in 1910 by Sigmund Freud, on an idea proposed by Sandor Ferenczi....
while she continued child analysis and seminars and conferences on the subject. In 1935, Freud became director of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Training Institute and in the following year she published her influential study of the "ways and means by which the ego wards off displeasure and anxiety",
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. It became a founding work of
ego psychologyEgo psychology is a school of psychoanalysis rooted in Sigmund Freud's structural id-ego-superego model of the mind.An individual interacts with the external world as well as responds to internal forces. Many psychoanalysts use a theoretical construct called the ego to explain how that is done...
and established Freud’s reputation as a pioneering theoretician.
1938 and later: Freud in London
In 1938 the Freuds had to flee from
AustriaAustria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.3 million people in Central Europe. It borders both Germany and the Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west...
as a consequence of the Nazis' intensifying harassment of Jews in Vienna following the
AnschlussThe ' , also known as the ', was the 1938 de facto annexation of Austria into Greater Germany by the Nazi regime....
by Germany. Her father's health was deteriorating rapidly due to a severe jaw cancer infection, so she had to organize the family's emigration to London. Here she continued her work and took care of her father, who finally died in the autumn of 1939. When Anna arrived in London, a conflict emerged between her and
Melanie KleinMelanie Klein was an Austrian-born British psychoanalyst who devised novel therapeutic techniques for children that had a significant impact on child psychology and contemporary psychoanalysis...
regarding developmental theories of children.
The war gave Freud opportunity to observe the effect of deprivation of parental care on children. She set up a centre for young war victims, called "The Hampstead War Nursery". Here the children got foster care although mothers were encouraged to visit as often as possible. The underlying idea was to give children the opportunity to form attachments by providing continuity of relationships. This was continued, after the war, at the
Bulldogs Bank Home, which was an orphanage, run by colleagues of Freud, that took care of children who survived concentration camps. Based on these observations Anna published a series of studies with her lifelong friend,
Dorothy Burlingham-TiffanyDorothy Burlingham-Tiffany was an American psychoanalyst and educator. A lifelong friend and partner of psychoanalyst Anna Freud, Burlingham is known for her joint work with Freud on depression in infants...
on the impact of
stressStress is a biological term for the consequences of the failure of a human or animal to respond appropriately to emotional or physical threats to the organism, whether actual or imagined....
on children and the ability to find substitute affections among peers when parents cannot give them.
In 1947, Freud and Kate Friedlaender established the Hampstead Child Therapy Courses. Five years later, a children's clinic was added. Here they worked with Freud's theory of the
developmental linesDevelopmental lines is a metaphor of Anna Freud from her developmental theory to stress the continuous and cumulative character of childhood development. It emphasises the interactions and interdependencies between maturational and environmental determinants in developmental steps...
. Furthermore Freud started lecturing on child psychology. Until then Child analysis had remained a quite uncharted territory. Siegfried Bernfeld and August Aichorn, who both had practical experience of dealing with children, mentored her in this.
From the 1950s until the end of her life Freud travelled regularly to the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
to lecture, to teach and to visit friends. During the 1970s she was concerned with the problems of emotionally deprived and socially disadvantaged children, and she studied deviations and delays in development. At Yale Law School, she taught seminars on crime and the family: this led to a transatlantic collaboration with Joseph Goldstein and Albert Solnit on children and the law, published as
Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973).
Freud died in
London[]London is the capital of England and the United Kingdom. It has been a major settlement for two millennia, and the history of London goes back to its founding by the Romans, when it was named Londinium. London's core, the ancient City of London, the 'square mile', retains its medieval boundaries...
on 9 October 1982. She was cremated at
Golders Green CrematoriumGolders Green Crematorium and Mausoleum was the first crematorium to be opened in London, and one of the oldest crematoria in Britain. It is owned by the London Cremation Co plc, and opened in 1902, designed by the architect Sir Ernest George....
and her ashes placed in a
marbleMarble is a non foliated metamorphic rock resulting from the metamorphism of limestone, composed mostly of calcite . It is extensively used for sculpture, as a building material, and in many other applications...
shelf next to her parents'
ancient GreekAncient Greece is the civilisation belonging to the period of Greek history lasting from the Greek Dark Ages ca. 1100 BC and the Dorian invasion, to 146 BC and the Roman conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth. It is generally considered to be the seminal culture which provided the...
funeral urn. Her lifelong friend Dorothy Burlingham and several other members of the Freud family also rest there.
One year after Freud's death a publication of her collected works appeared. She was mentioned as "a passionate and inspirational teacher" and in 1984 the Hampstead Clinic was renamed the Anna Freud Centre. Furthermore her home in London for forty years was in 1986, as she had wished, transformed into the Freud Museum, dedicated to her father and the psychoanalytical society.
Major contributions to psychoanalysis
Freud moved away from the classical position of her father, who was focusing his writings primarily on the unconscious
IdID, I.D. or id may refer to:* The id is part of the id, ego, and super-ego, the three parts of the psychic apparatus in Freudian psychology -Abbreviations:...
(a perspective she found to be restrictive) and instead emphasized the importance of the
egoego are the initials of an abstract poet named ernesto garcia orduna ...Ego is a Latin word meaning "I", cognate with the Greek "Εγώ " meaning "I" and may refer to:...
, the constant struggle and conflict it is experiencing by the need to answer contradicting wishes, desires, values and demands of reality. By this, she established the importance of the ego functions and the concept of defense mechanisms.
Focusing on research, observation and treatment of children, Anna Freud established a group of prominent child developmental analysis (which included
Erik EriksonErik Erikson was a Danish-German-American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst known for his theory on social development of human beings. He may be most famous for coining the phrase identity crisis. His son, Kai T...
,
Edith JacobsonEdith Jacobson was a German psychoanalyst. Her major contributions to psychoanalytic thinking dealt with the development of the sense of identity and self-esteem and with an understanding of depression and psychosis...
and
Margaret MahlerMargaret Schönberger Mahler was a Hungarian physician, who later became interested in psychiatry. She was a central figure on the world stage of psychoanalysis...
) who noticed that children's symptoms were ultimately analogue to personality disorders among adults and thus often related to developmental stages. At that time, these ideas were revolutionary and Anna provided us with a comprehensive developmental theory and the concept of
developmental linesDevelopmental lines is a metaphor of Anna Freud from her developmental theory to stress the continuous and cumulative character of childhood development. It emphasises the interactions and interdependencies between maturational and environmental determinants in developmental steps...
, which combined her father's important drive model with more recent object relations theories of development, which emphasize the importance of parents in child development processes.
Freud about essential personal qualities in psychoanalysts
"Dear John ...,
You asked me what I consider essential personal qualities in a future psychoanalyst. The answer is comparatively simple. If you want to be a real psychoanalyst you have to have a great love of the truth, scientific truth as well as personal truth, and you have to place this appreciation of truth higher than any discomfort at meeting unpleasant facts, whether they belong to the world outside or to your own inner person.
Further, I think that a psychoanalyst should have...interests...beyond the limits of the medical field...in facts that belong to sociology, religion, literature, ,[and] history,...[otherwise]his outlook on...his patient will remain too narrow. This point contains...the necessary preparations beyond the requirements made on candidates of psychoanalysis in the institutes. You ought to be a great reader and become acquainted with the literature of many countries and cultures. In the great literary figures you will find people who know at least as much of human nature as the psychiatrists and psychologists try to do.
Does that answer your question?"
Publications by Freud
- Freud, Anna (1966-1980). The Writings of Anna Freud: 8 Volumes. New York: IUP. (These volumes include most of Freud's papers.)
- Vol. 1. Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Lectures for Child Analysts and Teachers (1922-1935)
- Vol. 2. Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936)
- Vol. 3. Infants Without Families Reports on the Hampstead Nurseries by Anna Freud
- Vol. 4. Indications for Child Analysis and Other Papers (1945-1956)
- Vol. 5. Research at the Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic and Other Papers: (1956-1965)
- Vol. 6. Normality and Pathology in Childhood: Assessments of Development (1965)
- Vol. 7. Problems of Psychoanalytic Training, Diagnosis, and the Technique of Therapy (1966-1970)
- Vol. 8. Psychoanalytic Psychology of Normal Development
- Freud in collaboration with Sophie Dann: An Experiment in Group Upbringing, in: The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, VI, 1951. A group of six three-year-old former Terezin children is observed as regards group behavior, psychological problems and adaption. (Information taken from Biography Erna Furman
Erna Furman was a Vienna, Austrian-born American child psychoanalyst, psychologist and teacher.Erna Mary Popper was educated at the Academy of Commerce in Prague. As a little girl she had been to Montessori nursery school in Vienna...
)
External links