Anna Freud was born on December 3, 1895, in Vienna, Austria. She was the youngest of Sigmund Freud’s six children and was especially close to her father. Despite her father being renowned as the founder of the field of psychoanalysis, Freud’s contributions to the field of mental health stand on their own, rather than in the shadow of her father. She is considered the founder of child psychoanalysis. It is also much to her credit that her father, Sigmund Freud’s, defense mechanisms (such as repression, denial, and suppression) have become part of our everyday language, as it is his daughter Anna Freud who provided a clear description of these in her influential 1936 book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of the Defense.
It is said that Freud felt she learned little at school and did most of her learning from her father’s friends and associates. Indeed, her formal education did not go beyond high school. Freud worked as an elementary school teacher after high school and worked translating her father’s writings. The combination of these increased her own interest in child psychology and psychoanalysis, and she began a children’s psychoanalysis practice in 1923. In 1927, she published, “Introduction to the Technique of Child Psychoanalysis,” which was a significant development in the therapeutic treatment of children. Freud recognized that children’s mental health symptoms differed from those of adults, and she pointed out, importantly, that they often were related to various stages of development. She also recognized each child as an individual with their own needs and believed that therapeutic alliances needed to be established according to each child. In adapting psychoanalysis for children, Anna Freud recognized that lying on a couch was not conducive to children staying focused during therapy. Instead, she encouraged them to sit on the floor and play or draw, which she felt helped them to be more expressive, free, and truthful.
Freud’s dedication to children and child development extended beyond the therapy room. She began volunteer work in 1919 at the Baumgarten Children’s Home which served Jewish children who had been orphaned or made homeless because of World War I. In 1937 she and a colleague founded the Jackson Nursery, a nursery school for children living in poverty in Vienna. There, through investigative work, she discovered that children who were allowed to choose their own food ate better, gained needed weight, and achieved nutritional balance by themselves.
Her work in Vienna was cut short however by the Nazi invasion of Austria and then by Anna’s own arrest and interrogation by the Nazis in 1938. Able to convince her interrogators that her work was “innocuous,” Freud, who was Jewish, was able to obtain a visa to leave Vienna with her famous father and head to London, where Sigmund died just a few weeks later. Freud continued with her work with children in London, establishing the Hampstead War Nursery which provided foster care for single parent families. During this time, she conducted research into children’s trauma, which demonstrated that children who remained in London and endured Nazi bombings fared better emotionally than those who were sent away from their families to presumably safer surroundings.
Post World War II, Freud established the Hampstead Child Therapy Centre, which was granted charity status. The Centre, dedicated to child analysis and research, trained the first generation of child psychotherapists to work in the fledgling National Health Service in England. Renamed the Anna Freud Centre, the clinic exists today, recently celebrating its 70th year as a charity. Freud also published, “Normality and Pathology in Childhood,” in 1965, which significantly contributed to the establishment of the field of developmental psychology. Freud continued her work at her clinic until she died in 1983. Her contributions continue to impact the field of psychology and greatly shaped our understanding and approach to the treatment of children.
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