Anna Freud

Anna Freud was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary on 3 December 1895. She was the youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays.[4] She grew up in "comfortable bourgeois circumstances."[5] Anna Freud appears to have had a comparatively unhappy childhood, in which she "never made a close or pleasurable relationship with her mother, and was instead nurtured by their Catholic nurse Josephine."[6] She found it particularly difficult to get along with her eldest sister, Sophie: "the two young Freuds developed their version of a common sisterly division of territories: 'beauty' and 'brains',[7] and their father once spoke of her 'age-old jealousy of Sophie.'[8] As well as this rivalry between the two sisters, Anna had become: 'a somewhat troubled youngster who complained to her father in candid letters how all sorts of unreasonable thoughts and feelings plagued her'.[9] She may have suffered from depression which caused eating disorders.[10] and "she ... was repeatedly sent to health farms for thorough rest, salutary walks, and some extra pounds to fill out her all too slender shape'.[11]

The close relationship between Anna and her father was different from the rest of her family. She was a lively child with a reputation for mischief. Freud wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in 1899: "Anna has become downright beautiful through naughtiness."[12] In adolescence she took a precocious interest in her father’s work and was allowed to sit in on the meetings of the newly established Vienna Psychoanalytical Society which Freud convened at his home.[13]

Enrolled at the Cottage Lyceum, a secondary school for girls in Vienna, Anna made good progress in most subjects. The steady flow of foreign visitors to the Freud household inspired Anna to emulate her father by becoming proficient in different languages and she soon mastered English and French and acquired some basic Italian. The positive experience she had at the Lyceum led to her initial choice of teaching as a career. After she left the Lyceum in 1912 she took an extended vacation over the winter months in Italy. This proved to be, for a period, a time of self-doubt, anxiety and uncertainty about her future, concerns she shared in correspondence with her father whose writings she had begun reading. In response he provided reassurance and in the Spring of 1913 he joined her for a tour of Verona, Venice and Trieste.[14]

A visit to Britain in the autumn of 1914, chaperoned by her father's colleague Ernest Jones, became of concern to Freud when he learned of the latter's romantic interest. His advice to Jones, in a letter of 22 July 1914, was that his daughter "... does not claim to be treated as a woman, being still far away from sexual longings and rather refusing man. There is an outspoken understanding between me and her that she should not consider marriage or the preliminaries before she gets two or three years older".[15]

In 1914 she passed her teaching examination and began work as a teaching apprentice at her old school, the Cottage Lyceum. From 1915 to 1917, she worked as a teaching apprentice for third, fourth, and fifth graders. For the school year 1917–18, she began 'her first venture as Klassenlehrerin (head teacher) for the second grade'.[16] For her performance during the school years 1915-18 she was highly praised by her superior, Salka Goldman who 'wrote ... she showed "great zeal "for all her responsibilities, but she was particularly appreciated for her "conscientious preparations" and for her "gift for teaching" ... being such a success that she was invited to stay on with a regular four-year contract starting in the fall of 1918'.[16]

With the encouragement and assistance of her father she pursued her exploration of psychoanalytic literature and in the summer of 1915 she undertook her first translation work for the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society: papers by James Jackson Putnam (into German) and Hermine Hug-Hellmuth (into English). During 1916 and 1917 she attended the lectures on psychoanalysis her father gave at the University of Vienna. By 1918 she had gained his support to pursue a training in psychoanalysis and she went into analysis with him in October of that year. Having contracted tuberculosis during 1918, and thereafter experiencing multiple episodes of illness, she resigned her teaching post in 1920.[17]

As well as in the periods of analysis she had with her father (from 1918 to 1921 and from 1924 to 1929), their filial bond became further strengthened after Freud was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw in 1923, for which he would need numerous operations and the long-term nursing assistance which Anna provided. She also acted as his secretary and spokesperson, notably at the bi-annual congresses of the International Psychoanalytical Association which Freud was unable to attend.[18]

Anna Freud with her father Sigmund Freud in 1913

In 1922 Anna Freud presented her paper "Beating Fantasies and Daydreams" to the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society and became a member of the society. In 1923, she began her own psychoanalytical practice with children and by 1925 she was teaching at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute on the technique of child analysis, her approach to which she set out in her first book, An Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis published in 1927.

From 1925 until 1934, she was the Secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association while she continued her child analysis practice and contributed to seminars and conferences on the subject. In 1935, she became director of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Training Institute and the following year she published her influential study of the "ways and means by which the ego wards off depression, displeasure and anxiety", The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. It became a founding work of ego psychology and established Freud's reputation as a pioneering theoretician.[19]

Among the first children Anna Freud took into analysis were those of Dorothy Burlingham. In 1925 Burlingham, heiress to the Tiffany luxury jewellery retailer, had arrived in Vienna from New York with her four children and entered analysis firstly with Theodore Reik and then, with a view to training in child analysis, with Freud himself.[20] Anna and Dorothy soon developed "intimate relations that closely resembled those of lesbians", though Anna "categorically denied the existence of a sexual relationship".[21] After the Burlinghams moved into the same apartment block as the Freuds in 1929 she became, in effect, the children's stepparent.[22]

In 1938, following the Anschluss in which Nazi Germany occupied Austria, Anna was taken to Gestapo headquarters in Vienna for questioning on the activities of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Unknown to her father, she and her brother Martin had obtained Veronal from Max Schur, the family doctor, in sufficient quantities to commit suicide if faced with torture or internment. However, she survived her interrogation ordeal and returned to the family home. After her father had reluctantly accepted the urgent need to leave Vienna, she set about organising the complex immigration process for the family in liaison with Ernest Jones, the then President of the International Psychoanalytical Association, who secured the immigration permits that eventually led to the family establishing their new home in London at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead.[23]

Anna Freud's London home, now dedicated to the life and work of her father as the Freud Museum.

In 1941 Freud and Burlingham collaborated in establishing the Hampstead War Nursery for children whose lives had been disrupted by the war. Premises were acquired in Hampstead, North London and in Essex to provide education and residential care with mothers encouraged to visit as often as practicable. Many for the staff were recruited from the exiled Austro-German diaspora. Lectures and seminars on psychoanalytic theory and practice were regular features of staff training. Freud and Burlingham went on to publish a series of observational studies on child development based on the work of the Nursery with a focus on the impact of stress on children and their capacity to find substitute affections among peers in the absence of their parents.[24] The Bulldog Banks Home, run on similar lines to the Nursery, was established after the war for a group of children who had survived the concentration camps. Building on and developing their war-time work with children, Freud and Burlingham established the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic (now the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families) in 1952 as a centre for therapy, training and research work.

During the war years the hostility between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein and their respective followers in the British Psychoanalytic Society (BPS) grew more intense. Their disagreements, which dated back to the 1920s, centered around the theory of the genesis of the super-ego and the consequent clinical approach to the pre-Oedipal child; Klein argued for play as an equivalent to free association in adult analyses. Anna Freud opposed any such equivalence, proposing an educative intervention with the child until an appropriate level of ego development was reached at the Oedipal stage. Klein held this to be a collusive inhibition of analytical work with the child. To avoid a terminal split in the BPS Ernest Jones, its president, chaired a number of "extraordinary business meetings" with the aim of defusing the conflict, and these continued during the war years. The meetings, which became known as the Controversial Discussions, were established on a more regular basis from 1942. In 1944 there finally emerged a compromise agreement which established parallel training courses, providing options to satisfy the concerns of the rival groups that had formed which by then, in addition to the followers of Freud and Klein, included a non-aligned group of Middle or Independent Group analysts. It was agreed further that all the key policy-making committees of the BPS should have representatives from the three groups.[25]

From the 1950s until the end of her life Freud travelled regularly to the United States to lecture, teach and 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 J. Solnit on children's needs and the law, published in three volumes as Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973), Before the Best Interests of the Child (1979), and In the Best Interests of the Child (1986).

The 1970s were also a time of emotional stress for Freud as she endured a number of bereavements involving family members and close colleagues. Her favourite brother, Ernst, died in April 1970 while she was in America. In the following months she lost two of her American cousins, Henry Freud and Rosie Waldinger, and colleagues Heinz Hartmann and Max Schur. She suffered further distress following the death of her partner Dorothy Burlingham’s eldest son and daughter, both of whom had had extensive period of analysis with her as children in Vienna and as adults in London. Robert Burlingham died in February 1970 of heart disease after a long period of depression.[26] In 1974 Burlingham’s daughter Mabbie arrived in London from her New York home seeking further analysis with Anna, notwithstanding the latter’s advice to continue in analysis with her New York analyst. Whilst at the family home in Hampstead she took an overdose of sleeping pills and died in hospital three days later.[27]

Freud naturalised as a British subject on 22 July 1946.[28] She was elected as a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959[29] and in 1973 she was made an Honorary President of the International Psychoanalytic Association.[30]

Freud died in London on 9 October 1982. She was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and her ashes placed in the "Freud Corner" next to her parents' ancient Greek funeral urn.[31] Her life-partner Dorothy Burlingham and several other members of the Freud family also rest there. In 1986 her London home of forty years was transformed, according to her wishes, into the Freud Museum, dedicated to the memory of her father.