Anna was born on December 3, 1895, in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, to Sigmund Freud, a neurologist now known as the father of psychoanalysis’, and his wife, Martha Bernays. She had five elder siblings: Mathilde, Jean Martin, Oliver, Ernst and Sophie.
From an early age, she had a strained relationship with her mother and also remained distant from her five siblings. Anna had major difficulty in getting along with her sister Sophie, who was very attractive and with whom she rivaled for her father’s attention.
Anna also suffered from depression which caused chronic eating disorders and was repeatedly sent to health farms for thorough rest. Despite her misfits, she developed a close relationship with her father who was very fond of her.
Education
Anna received most of her education from her father despite attending schools. She attended the Cottage Lyceum in Vienna. In 1975, she was awarded an MD degree from the University of Vienna.
Career
In 1914, upon Anna's return to Vienna, she began teaching at the Cottage Lyceum, her old school. From 1915 to 1917, she served there as a trainee, and then as a teacher from 1917 to 1920.
In 1918, she became actively involved in her father’s psychoanalysis study in which she was the subject of his research. In 1922, she was able to present the results of this analysis to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in a paper titled ‘The Relation of Beating Fantasies to a Daydream’.
Later she began working with children in private practice. Within two years, she was offered a teaching position at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute.
From 1927 to 1934, Anna served as the General Secretary of the ‘International Psychoanalytical Association’. In 1935, she became the director of the ‘Vienna Psychoanalytical Training Institute’. Later, she published her book ‘The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense’, a study that laid the groundwork for the field of ego psychology.
During this time she also founded the Hietzing School, along with Dorothy Burlingham and Eva Rosenfeld. The school was an attempt to create a more holistic educational curriculum informed by psychoanalytic principles.
In 1938, when the Nazi threat became unsustainable, she fled to London along with her father. In 1941, she formed the ‘Hampstead War Nursery’ which served as a psychoanalytic program and home for homeless children.
She also published three books ‘Young Children in Wartime’ (1942), ‘Infants Without Families’ (1943), and ‘War and Children’ (1943) based on her experiences at the war nursery.
Anna established the ‘Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic’ and served as its director from 1952 until her death. In 1965, she published her work ‘Normality and Pathology in Childhood’. In it she explained her hypothesis that children go through normal developmental stages against which everyone can be assessed, and that this capacity to develop is the key component of the diagnostic process.
Later in life, Anna visited Yale Law School and conducted courses on crime and its effect on family relationships. In 1973, she published ‘Beyond the Best Interests of the Child’ with Albert Solnit and Joseph Goldstein. She died on October 9, 1982, in London, England, at the age of 86.
Achievements
Anna Freud's pioneering efforts in establishing the theory and method of child psycho analysis expanded the legacy of her father, Sigmund Freud, while it applied psychoanalytic discoveries to practical problems of child care and development in her innovative child care and study centers. As an investigator, speaker, teacher, and writer, she established a training method and body of scientific work that greatly influenced the study of children in the late twentieth century.
Anna created the field of child psychoanalysis and her work contributed greatly to the understanding of child psychology. She noted that children’s symptoms differed from those of adults and were often related to developmental stages.
One of her most significant published works is ‘The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense’ in which she outlined and expanded upon her father's theory of psychological defense mechanisms.
The final track on the eponymous debut album of indie-rock band The National is titled "Anna Freud".
In Anna's final years, Freud believed the future of psychoanalysis lay in examining each developmental path that led to adulthood. Instead of seeking the origin of disturbances in earliest life, she proposed a number of "developmental lines" of normal development in which disturbance could occur. Psychic disturbance, she believed, may have many origins and take forms in childhood and adulthood which are not necessarily causally related or even similar. A later major work, Normality and Pathology in Childhood, focused on assessing childhood developmental stages and establishing norms for childhood development.
Freud came to believe that modern analysis had wrongly shifted attention from unearthing repressed past childhood experiences to dealing solely with the patient's present relations with the therapist. She also disagreed with the modern shift from a father-centered to mother-centered approach. When asked about her views on the subject of mothering, Freud replied that she had never written of mother-daughter relations because she knew nothing about them.
Quotations:
"I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time."
"Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training."
"Who promised you that only for joy were you brought to this earth?"
"If some longing goes unmet, don't be astonished. We call that Life."
"Why do we go around acting as though everything was friendship and reliability when basically everything everywhere is full of sudden hate and ugliness?"
"Sometimes the most beautiful thing is precisely the one that comes unexpectedly and unearned, hence something given truly as a present."
"The horrors of war, pale beside the loss of a mother."
"In our dreams we can have our eggs cooked exactly how we want them, but we can't eat them."
"Everyone here says in a surprised manner that I have grown. .. they are so stupid and do not notice that I am standing up straighter!"
Membership
Anna became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.
Connections
A striking irony of Anna's life was that she never married or had children of her own; and in spite of her lifelong dedication to the care of children, she refused to be identified as a universal mother figure.
