biography of anna freud

• Bipolar Disorder
• Therapy Center
• When To See a Therapist
• Types of Therapy
• Best Online Therapy
• Best Couples Therapy
• Managing Stress
• Sleep and Dreaming
• Understanding Emotions
• Self-Improvement
• Healthy Relationships
• Student Resources
• Personality Types
• Sweepstakes
• Guided Meditations
• Verywell Mind Insights
• 2024 Verywell Mind 25
• Mental Health in the Classroom
• Editorial Process
• Meet Our Review Board
• Crisis Support

Anna Freud Biography (1895-1982)

The name Freud is most often associated with Sigmund, the Austrian doctor who founded the school of thought known as psychoanalysis. But his youngest daughter, Anna Freud, was also an influential psychologist who had a major impact on psychoanalysis , psychotherapy , and child psychology .

Who Was Anna Freud?

Anna Freud did more than live in her father's rather long shadow in the field of psychology. Instead, she became one of the world's foremost psychoanalysts. She is recognized as the founder of child psychoanalysis, despite the fact that her father often suggested that children could not be psychoanalyzed. She strongly believed that psychoanalysis was not appropriate for children under the age of six, who she thought could be better served through other methods, but still applied psychoanalysis to a wider age range than her father.

She also expanded on her father's work and identified many different types of defense mechanisms that the ego uses to protect itself from anxiety. While Sigmund Freud described a number of defense mechanisms, it was his daughter Anna Freud who provided the clearest and most comprehensive look at mechanisms of defense in her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936).

Many of these defense mechanisms (such as denial , repression , and suppression) have become so well-known that they are used frequently in everyday language.

Anna Freud is best known for:

• Contributions to ego psychology
• Defense mechanisms
• Founder of child psychoanalysis

Birth and Death

• Anna Freud was born December 3, 1895, in Vienna, Austria.
• She died on October 9, 1982, in London, England

The youngest of Sigmund Freud's six children, Anna was extraordinarily close to her father. Anna was not close to her mother and was said to have tense relationships with her five siblings.   She attended a private school but later said she learned little at school. The majority of her education was from the teachings of her father's friends and associates.

After high school, Anna Freud worked as an elementary school teacher and began translating some of her father's works into German, increasing her interest in child psychology and psychoanalysis. While she was heavily influenced by her father's work, she was far from living in his shadow. Her own work expanded upon her father's ideas, but also created the field of child psychoanalysis.

Although Anna Freud never earned a higher degree, her work in psychoanalysis and child psychology contributed to her eminence in the field of psychology . She began her children's psychoanalytic practice in 1923 in Vienna, Austria and later served as chair of the Vienna Psycho-Analytic Society. During her time in Vienna, she had a profound influence on Erik Erikson , who later went on to expand the field of psychoanalysis and ego psychology even further.

In 1938, Anna was interrogated by the Gestapo and then fled to London along with her father. In 1941, she formed the Hampstead Nursery with Dorothy Burlingham. The nursery served as a psychoanalytic program and home for homeless children.

Her experiences at the nursery provided the inspiration for three books, Young Children in Wartime (1942), Infants Without Families (1943), and War and Children (1943). After the Hampstead Nursery closed in 1945, Freud created the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic and served as director from 1952 until her death in 1982.

Contributions to Psychology

Anna Freud created the field of child psychoanalysis, and her work contributed greatly to our understanding of child psychology. She also developed different techniques to treat children.

Freud noted that children’s symptoms differed from those of adults and were often related to developmental stages.   She also provided clear explanations of the ego's defense mechanisms in her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936).

Select Works

• Freud, A. (1936) Ego & the Mechanisms of Defense.
• Freud, A. (1956-1965) Research at the Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic & Other Papers.
• Freud, A. (1965) Normality & Pathology in Childhood: Assessments of Development.

Biographies

• Peters, U. H. (1985) Anna Freud: A Life Dedicated to Children. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.
• Young-Bruehl, E. (1988) Anna Freud: A Biography. Summit Books, New York.

Freud Museum of London. Anna Freud and child psychoanalysis .

Aldridge J, Kilgo JL, Jepkemboi G.  Four hidden matriarchs of psychoanalysis: The relationship of Lou von Salome, Karen Horney, Sabina Spielrein and Anna Freud to Sigmund Freud .  International Journal of Psychology and Counseling.  2014;6(4):32-39. doi:10.5897/IJPC2014.0250

Stewart-Steinberg S. Impious Fidelity: Anna Freud, Psychoanalysis, Politics . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; 2012.

Hartman JJ. Anna Freud and the Holocaust: Mourning and survival guilt . The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 2014;95(6):1183-1210. doi:10.1111/1745-8315.12250

Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Anna Freud . Encyclopaedia Britannica. Updated December 2, 2019.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Fact Monster - People - Biography of Anna Freud

Anna Freud (born Dec. 3, 1895, Vienna—died Oct. 9, 1982, London) was an Austrian-born British founder of child psychoanalysis and one of its foremost practitioners. She also made fundamental contributions to understanding how the ego, or consciousness , functions in averting painful ideas, impulses, and feelings.

(Read Sigmund Freud’s 1926 Britannica essay on psychoanalysis.)

The youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud, Anna was devoted to her father and enjoyed an intimate association with developing psychoanalytic theory and practice. As a young woman she taught elementary school, and her daily observation of children drew her to child psychology . While serving as chairman of the Vienna Psycho-Analytic Society (1925–28), she published a paper (1927) outlining her approach to child psychoanalysis.

Publication of Anna Freud’s Das Ich und die Abwehrmechanismen (1936; The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense, 1937) gave a strong, new impetus to ego psychology . The principal human defense mechanism , she indicated, is repression , an unconscious process that develops as the young child learns that some impulses, if acted upon, could prove dangerous to himself. Other mechanisms she described include the projection of one’s own feeling into another; directing aggressive impulses against the self (suicide being the extreme example); identification with an overpowering aggressor; and the divorce of ideas from feelings. The work also was a pioneer effort in the development of adolescent psychology.

In 1938 Anna Freud and her father, whom she had cared for during a number of years of his terminal illness, escaped from Nazi-dominated Austria and settled in London , where she worked at a Hampstead nursery until 1945. During World War II she and a U.S. associate, Dorothy Burlingham, recounted their work in Young Children in Wartime (1942), Infants Without Families (1943), and War and Children (1943).

Anna Freud founded the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic, London, in 1947 and served as its director from 1952 to 1982. She viewed play as the child’s adaptation to reality but not necessarily as a revelation of unconscious conflicts. She worked closely with parents and believed that analysis should have an educational influence on the child. A summation of her thought is to be found in her Normality and Pathology in Childhood (1968).

Anna Freud: Theory & Contributions To Psychology

Teaching Fellow

B.A., Neurobiology & Linguistics, Harvard University

Iqra Noor is a graduate of Harvard University, where she earned a Bachelor's degree in Neurobiology and Linguistics, with a specialization in Global Health and Health Policy. She also served as a teaching fellow and thesis researcher during her time at Harvard.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

On This Page:

Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud, significantly advanced the field of child psychoanalysis. She emphasized the importance of the ego and its defensive mechanisms, helping to elucidate how children’s emotional conflicts influence their development. Additionally, she founded the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic in London, contributing to the establishment of psychoanalytic child therapy as a distinct discipline.

Who Was Anna Freud?

• Known For: Founder of child psychoanalysis and contributed to ego and adolescent psychology.
• Born: December 3, 1895, in Vienna, Austria.
• Died: October 9, 1982, in London, England.
• Parents: Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays.
• Contributions: Anna Freud became a major force in British psychology, specializing in the application of psychoanalysis to children. Among her best-known works are The Ego and the Mechanism of Defense (1936).
• She established the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic (1952, now known as the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families).
• She promoted parent guidance and school consultation as important functions of the child therapist.

Because of her lifetime work with children and insight into child psychology through theoretical and practice perspectives, Anna Freud is known as the founder of child psychoanalysis and also contributed to ego and adolescent psychology.

In her own words, she didn’t think “I”d be a good subject for biography, “not enough “action”! You would say all there is to say in a few sentences – she spent her life with children!”

Even in such a simple summary of her life, she greatly expanded her psychoanalytical thought. Her contribution to ego psychology consisted of describing various mechanisms of defense , including repression (the principal human defense mechanism), projection, and regression.

Her clinical experience and publications offered insight into children’s developmental stages, providing us with psychological techniques to treat children and to understand the existing differences between a child and an adult.

Anna Freud was the Austrian-British founder of child psychoanalysis. She was the sixth and the youngest of Martha and Sigmund Freud’s children (Sigmund Freud Museum).

Similar to her father, Sigmund Freud , she contributed to the field of psychoanalysis but with a particular focus on children, revolutionizing the ways children are treated in many fields.

Throughout her work, she combined theoretical and practical perspectives into describing and refining child psychoanalysis.

Though Anna did not have a meaningful relationship with her mother and was jealous of her elder sister’s beauty, Anna was a lively child according to her father as shown in his letter to a friend in 1899 that “Anna has become downright beautiful through naughtiness” (Sigmund Freud Museum).

Anna Freud finished her education at Cottage Lyceum in Vienna in 1912 while uncertain of her career.

Therefore, she moved to England after two years to improve her English, but her time there was cut short due to World War I, resulting in her return to Vienna, where she began to teach at her alma mater in 1917 (Sigmund Freud Museum).

Her further studies consisted of learning from her father’s psychoanalysis work and practical experiences. She became a child psychoanalyst without a medical degree.

Career: Timeline of Contributions

Anna Freud presented her first paper, Beating Fantasies and Daydreams,  and became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society (Sandler, 2015).

In her paper, she explained that “Daydreaming, which consciously may be designed to suppress masturbation, is mainly unconsciously an elaboration of the original masturbatory fantasies” (Fenichel, 1945, p. 232)

She established her psychoanalytic practice with children and became an instructor at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute.

During this time, Anna also began to nurse her father as he became a patient of cancer (Sigmund Freud Museum).

Anna became the Secretary of International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and continued her child analyses while lecturing on the subject, organizing conferences and nursing

her father, as well as publicly representing him on various occasions, including award ceremonies (Sandler, 2015).

Anna’s work at the Training Institute resulted in her first book Introduction to the Techniques of Child Analysis , which consisted of lectures for teachers, parents, and others who came into contact with children.

Later, she was invited to present this publication in London, where she discovered her approach to be widely different from that of Melanie Klein .

Through a series of “controversial discussions,” their conflicting theories resulted in the formation of different schools of thought: Anna’s theories of child development and Melanie’s theory of object relations (based on the mother-infant relationship) (Taylor, 2009, p. 78).

Anna became the director of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute in 1935.

The following year, she expanded the psychoanalytic thought in ego and defenses with her publication of Das Ich and die Abwehrmechanismen (the Ego and the Mechanisms of Defenses, 1937), which became the founding work of ego psychology and still remains a standard text today.

In this book, she describes various mechanisms of defense and how ego unconsciously protect an individual from unpleasant feelings arising from both within and outside.

With the upheavals in Austrian political and economic situations in the 1930s, Anna integrated philanthropy into her psychoanalytic work.

She supervised Jackson Nursery (funded by Edith Jackson, an American child psychoanalyst) in Vienna for economically deprived children.

In this nursery, Anna and her friend Dorothy Burlingham continued their work by observing child behavior and experimenting with their feeding patterns.

In 1938, the nursery closed due to the arrival of Nazis in Austria, and Ernest Jones (former IPA President) helped in fleeing the Freud family to London (Sigmund Freud Museum).

Within a few months of the war, Sigmund Freud passed away. By this time, Anna had established her child psychoanalytic practice in London.

Anna, with her friend Dorothy Burlingham, established the Hampstead War Nurseries to provide foster care to children during the war.

Due to these nurseries, she was able to observe the impact of separation from families on children’s normal development. Written detailed observations of children’s daily behavior in the nurseries became pivotal practical perspectives for Anna and Dorothy in their work and helped refine the child’s normal and pathological development.

Later, they recounted these observations in three publications: Young Children in War-Time (1942), War and Children (1943), and infants Without Families (1944).

With Kate Friedlaender (a female psychoanalyst), Anna established Hampstead Child Therapy Courses and later founded a children’s clinic.

At this clinic, Anna and her staff gained insight into children’s development through weekly case studies by tracking theoretical normal growth “from dependency to self-reliance” and using diagnostic profiles to identify abnormal and normal factors in child development (Sigmund Freud Museum).

Anna began working and analyzing children from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds and was committed to sharing her analytical work with those who work with children, such as parents, teachers, and pediatricians.

She also traveled to the United States and explored the application of psychoanalytical ideas on family and crime at Yale Law school. This participation resulted in two publications:  Before the Best Interests of the Child (1973) with Joseph Goldstein and Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973) with Joseph Goldstein and Albert Solnit (Sandler, 2015).

Anna published Normality and Pathology in Childhood (1965), which explained all stages of child development from infancy to adolescence and used her personal observation at children’s clinics and other child and adult analyses as evidence.

Anna Freud began to receive honorary doctorates from various universities, including Harvard University and Vienna University. In 1973, she became the Honorary President of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) until her death in 1982.

On October 9, 1982, Freud passed away in London. After her death, Hampstead Clinic was renamed to Anna Freud Center as a tribute and her home in London became the Freud Museum (Sigmund Freud Museum).

She has been recognized by many in her life, but she always dedicated the awards to the field of psychoanalysis rather than herself.

Critical Evaluation

Anna Freud established the field of child psychoanalysis and her work contributed greatly to the theory of child psychology. She developed different techniques to treat children, and noticed that children’s symptoms different from those of adults and were often related to developmental stages.

Anna Freud provided clear explanations of the ego’s defense mechanisms in her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936), including displacement, sublimation, and Regression.

How did Freud Disagree with Klein?

“Anna Freud”. (February 27, 2009). Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia . https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/freud-anna

Fenichel, O. (1945). The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis . New York: W. W. Norton.

Klein, M. (1961). Narrative of a child analysis: The conduct of the psychoanalysis of children as seen in the treatment of a ten year old boy (No. 55). Random House.

Reuters. (October 10, 1982). Anna Freud, Psychoanalyst, Dies in London at 86. New York Times Archive. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1203.html

Sandler, A. M. (2015). Anna Freud. Institute of Psychoanalysis: British Psychoanalytical Society. https://psychoanalysis.org.uk/our-authors-and-theorists/anna-freud

Sigmund Freud Museum. (n.d.). Anna Freud: 1895-1982. Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. https://www.freud-museum.at/online/freud/themen/anna1-e.htm

Taylor, E. (2009). The Mystery of Personality: A History of Psychodynamic Theories . New York: Springer.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (December 02, 2019). Anna Freud. Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anna-Freud .

Key Publications

Freud, A., & Clark, L. P. (1928). Introduction to the technic of child analysis (No. 48). Nervous and Mental Disease.

Freud, A. (1936). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. International Universities Press, Inc.

Freud, A., & Burlingham, D. T. (1947). Infants Without Families: Reports on the Hampstead Nurseries , 1939-1945. International Universities Press.

Freud, A. (1954). The widening scope of indications for psychoanalysis discussion . Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2 (4), 607-620.

Freud, Anna. (1966). Normality and Pathology in Childhood: Assessments of Development . International Universities Press, Inc.

Freud, A. (1971). Problems of Psychoanalytic Training, Diagnosis, and the Technique of Therapy , 1966-1970 (Vol. 7). International Universities Press, Inc.

Freud, A. (1982). Psychoanalytic psychology of normal development , 1970-1980 (No. 112). Vintage.

further Reading

• Psychoanalytic Play Therapy
• Anna Freud: The Hampstead War Nurseries and the role of the direct observation of children for psychoanalysis
• Between practice and theory: Melanie Klein, Anna Freud and the development of child analysis
• Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families

Anna Freud, Founder of Child Psychoanalysis

Bettmann / Contributor / Getty Images

• Archaeology

• Ph.D., Psychology, Fielding Graduate University
• M.A., Psychology, Fielding Graduate University
• B.A., Film Studies, Cornell University

Anna Freud was the daughter of Sigmund Freud . While her father was a giant in the field of psychology, Anna Freud was an accomplished psychologist in her own right. She was the founder of child psychoanalysis and extended and further refined her father’s ideas about defense mechanisms.

Fast Facts: Anna Freud

• Known For: Founding child psychoanalysis and work on ego’s defense mechanisms
• Born: December 3, 1895 in Vienna, Austria
• Died: October 9, 1982 in London, England
• Parents: Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays
• Key Accomplishments: Chairman of the Vienna Psycho-Analytic Society (1925-1928); Honorary President of the International Psychoanalytical Association (1973-1982); Founder of the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic (1952, now known as the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families )

Anna Freud was born in 1895 in Vienna, Austria. She was the youngest of six children born to Sigmund Freud and his wife, Martha Bernays. She did not have a good relationship with her mother and was distant from her five siblings, especially her sister Sophie, who she felt was a rival for her father’s attention. However, she was close to her father.

Anna Freud graduated from Cottage Lyceum in 1912. While she didn’t go on to higher education, she claimed that she learned more at home from her father and his colleagues than she ever did at school. And, of course, Anna Freud had unparalleled access to information on psychoanalysis, which would eventually enable her to become an important voice in the field.

In 1917, Anna Freud took a job as a primary school teacher . She also started to undergo psychoanalysis with her father—a practice that would be considered unusual today but was more common at the time.

In 1923, Anna Freud started her own psychoanalytic practice focusing specifically on children. This was also the year that her father was diagnosed with cancer and Anna became his caretaker. Shortly afterwards, Anna Freud started teaching at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute. Then in 1927, she became the Secretary for the International Psychoanalytic Association, and in 1935, the director of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute. The following year she published her best-known work, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, which expanded on her father’s ideas about defenses and the ways the ego works to protect itself.

In 1938, when the Nazi threat became too great, Anna and Sigmund Freud fled Vienna and settled in London. World War II started there in 1939. Sigmund Freud died a few weeks later.

During her early years in England, Freud found herself in conflict with Melanie Klein , another psychoanalyst who was also formulating techniques to use with children. Freud and Klein differed on key points about child development, which led to their different approaches to analysis. In order to resolve the disagreement, they engaged in a series of “Controversial Discussions” that ended with the British Psychoanalytical Society forming training courses for both perspectives. 

In 1941, Anna Freud opened The Hampstead War Nurseries with her friend Dorothy Burlingham. There, they cared for children who had been separated from their families due to the war and documented the children’s responses to the stress of being separated from their parents. After closing the nursery at the end of the war, Freud founded the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic in 1952. She was its director until her death in London in 1982. 

Contributions to Psychology

Freud was a pioneer of child psychoanalysis. She developed new techniques to help children, as she found they required different psychological treatments than adults. She also pointed out that the symptom’s exhibited by children varied from those displayed by adults. She suggested this was a result of children’s developmental stages.

In addition, her work on the ego’s defense mechanisms is still considered seminal. It was a major contribution to both ego psychology and adolescent psychology. Freud said repression, the unconscious suppression of impulses that could be problematic if they were acted upon, was the principle defense mechanism. She also detailed a number of other defense mechanisms, including denial, projection, and displacement.

• Freud, Anna. (1936). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense .
• Freud, Anna. (1965). Normality and Pathology in Childhood: Assessments of Development .
• Freud, Anna. (1966-1980). The Writing of Anna Freud: 8 Volumes .
• Cherry, Kendra. “Anna Freud Biography (1895-1982).” Verywell Mind , 11 November 2018. https://www.verywellmind.com/anna-freud-biography-1895-1982-2795536
• GoodTherapy. “Anna Freud (1895-1982).” 14 July 2015. https://www.goodtherapy.org/famous-psychologists/anna-freud.html
• Sandler, Anna Marie. "Anna Freud." British Psychoanalytical Society , 2015. https://psychoanalysis.org.uk/our-authors-and-theorists/anna-freud
• Smirle, Corinne. "Profile of Anna Freud." Psychology's Feminist Voices Multimedia Internet Archive, edited by In A. Rutherford. http://www.feministvoices.com/anna-freud/
• Sigmund Freud Museum. "Vita Anna Freud." https://www.freud-museum.at/en/sigmund-and-anna-freud/vita-anna-freud.html
•  Sigmund Freud Museum. "Biography Anna Freud." https://www.freud-museum.at/files/inhalte/dokumente/en/anna_freud_biopgraphy_eng_pdf.pdf
• The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Anna Freud: Austrian-British Psychoanalyst.” Encyclopaedia Britannica , 29 November 2018. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anna-Freud
• Psychodynamic Theory: Approaches and Proponents
• Freudian Slips: The Psychology Behind Slips of the Tongue
• Freud: Id, Ego, and Superego Explained
• Biography of Albert Ellis, Creator of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy
• Oedipus Complex
• The Life of Carl Jung, Founder of Analytical Psychology
• Carl Rogers: Founder of the Humanistic Approach to Psychology
• Dream Interpretation According to Psychology
• An Introduction to Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development
• Biography of Hans Eysenck
• How Psychology Defines and Explains Deviant Behavior
• The Stages of Adlerian Therapy
• Genie Wiley, the Feral Child
• What Is Object Permanence?
• Understanding Maslow's Theory of Self-Actualization
• What Is Survivor's Guilt? Definition and Examples

• Members Login

Search form

• Our Authors and Theorists

From early childhood, she did not get on with her mother and felt very jealous of her immediately elder sister. She admired her father greatly and by the age of fourteen already showed a real interest for psychoanalysis. In 1917 she started work as a primary school teacher, a vocation she greatly enjoyed, but which was cut short when she contracted tuberculosis.  During her protracted recovery she read the writings of Freud and his colleagues, which galvanised her determination to become a psychoanalyst.

She started her own analysis with her father, a not unusual occurrence in those days. She continued to study the psychoanalytic literature and started work with patients. She also took part in lively exchanges with colleagues. She became a Member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1922, following presentation of her paper ‘Beating Fantasies and Daydreams’ and begins to work psychoanalytically with children.

In 1923 her father was diagnosed with cancer and this precipitated Anna Freud into taking unexpected responsibility in the newly established Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1925 she became Secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), later becoming Honorary President in 1973 until her death in 1982.

Anna Freud published in 1927 ’Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis’ which she was invited to present later in the year in London. She was strongly criticized by Melanie Klein and her colleagues and it became clear that both women’s had widely differing points of view regarding the theory and practice of child psychoanalysis. Regretfully, a rapprochement was never possible.

In 1936, with ‘The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence’, her first major book, Anna Freud returns to and greatly expands the existing ideas about defences. She discusses through describing various mechanisms of defence how the ego attempts to protect itself from danger arising from both inside the individual and outside him, especially to protect itself from being helplessly overwhelmed. This book was very well received and remains a standard text today.

In 1937 she opened the Jackson Nursery in Vienna for extremely deprived toddlers.  Closed in 1938 due to the arrival of the Nazis, the Freud’s subsequently fled Austria.  Ernest Jones (former IPA President) devoted great energy and remarkable skill to bring them safely to London and Anna Freud remained deeply indebted to him.

In 1941, Anna Freud, with her friend and colleague Dorothy Burlingham, opened ’The Hampstead War Nurseries’, caring for babies, toddlers and young children, separated from their families by the vagaries of the war.  In-service training required staff to write detailed observations about the day-to-day behaviour of the children. These observations were discussed every evening with Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham and their understanding became crucial in helping to refine the insight in the child’s normal and pathological development.  These observations became the basis of two fascinating publications entitled ‘Young Children in War Time’ (1942) and ‘Infants without Families’ (1944).

With the creation of the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic in 1959, she pursued a threefold aim. Provide training in child psychoanalysis, create a child and adolescent clinic and develop a place for research. It was a vibrant place of learning , enhanced further by developing links with University College London. The Hampstead Clinic was renamed the Anna Freud Centre after her death. 

In her 1965 publication ‘Normality and Pathology in Childhood’, she describes a coherent theory which gave due weight to all stages and areas of a child’s development from infancy to adolescence. Her theory allowed the analyst to distinguish material from different areas and levels of development and to view psychopathology against the background of normal development, thus achieving a balanced understanding of childhood disorders.

Through a number of specific publications, talks and seminars, Anna Freud demonstrated a deep dedication to sharing her analytic understanding with all those who came into contact with children, specifically teachers, parents, nurses, paediatricians and lawyers.

She was a strong voice alongside James and Joyce Robertson, John Bowlby and Isabel Menzies Lyth in studying the impact of hospitalisation and separation on young children.

Anna Freud’s participation in a Yale Law Faculty initiative to discuss the application of psychoanalytic ideas on areas such as family law or criminal law, producing two important publications ‘Beyond the Best Interests of the Child’, with J. Goldstein and A. Solnit (1973) and ‘Before the Best Interests of the Child’, with J. Goldstein, A. Solnit and S. Goldstein (1979).

Much had to be left out from this brief survey of Anna Freud’s work, but despite her consistent and unwavering identification with the work of her father, it is clear that she made also substantial and original contributions in her own voice.

Anne Marie Sandler 2015

Click here to read Anna Freud's publications on PEP Web

You can learn more about Anna Freud with our new online course.

Sign Up Today

Start your 14 day free trial today

History Hit Story of England: Making of a Nation

• 20th Century

Anna Freud: The Pioneering Child Psychoanalyst

Lucy Davidson

10 may 2022, @lucejuiceluce.

Austrian-born British Anna Freud is best known for founding and significantly contributing to the field of child psychoanalysis. A foremost psychoanalyst, she made extensive contributions to understanding how the ‘ego’, or consciousness, works to avoid painful impulses, ideas and feelings.

Born into a family with a professional background in psychiatry – her father was the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud – Anna Freud was notable in that she recognised that working with children, rather than just adults, could have a profound impact on her subjects’ mental health in later life.

On a personal level, her life was varied – her family fled the Nazis – and today, her former home is now the Freud Museum . Here are 10 facts about Anna Freud.

1. She was the child of famous neurologist Sigmund Freud

Anna Freud was born on 3 December 1895 in Vienna, then Austria-Hungary . The youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays, her childhood was materially comfortable but reportedly emotionally unhappy. She never had a close relationship with her mother, found it difficult to get on with some of her sisters and reportedly suffered from depression and eating disorders.

Photographic portrait of Sigmund Freud, around 1921

Image Credit: Max Halberstadt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

2. She spoke multiple languages

Freud attended the Cottage Lyceum, a secondary school for girls in Vienna, where she did well academically and inspired her to choose teaching as a career. The flow of foreign visitors to the Freud household meant that Anna spoke English, French and a little Italian in addition to German.

3. She was a schoolteacher

In 1914, Freud started working as a teaching apprentice at her old school. She was praised for her work as a teacher, and in 1918 was invited to stay on with a regular four-year contract. However, her teaching career was cut short by a bout of tuberculosis. During her long recovery, she read her father’s writings , which piqued her interest in pursuing a career in psychoanalysis, rather than teaching.

4. She assumed more professional responsibility when her father became ill

Freud started her own research and analysis alongside her father, then started to work with patients. In 1922 she became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society after she presented her paper, Beating Fantasies and Daydreams . It was then that she also started working closely with children.

In 1923, her father was diagnosed with cancer which prompted Freud to take more responsibility in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1925 she became Secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) then later became Honorary President in 1973 until her death.

Anna Freud with her father Sigmund Freud in 1913 (left) / Anna Freud in 1956 (right)

Image Credit: Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (left) / Unknown authorUnknown author, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (right)

5. She developed theories about the ‘ego’

While Secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Freud continued her child analysis practice and published her famous study The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence . It became a founding work of ego psychology and properly established Freud’s reputation as a pioneer in the field.

6. Her family fled the Nazis

In 1937, Freud opened the Jackson Nursery in Vienna for severely deprived toddlers. However, it was closed in 1938 due to the rise of the Nazis . In the same year as its closure, Freud was taken to Gestapo headquarters in Vienna for questioning about the activities of the IPA. She survived her interrogation and returned home, then started arranging for the whole family to leave Vienna.

A former IPA President Ernest Jones helped secure immigration permits for the family to get to Britain, which resulted in the family establishing their new home in Hampstead, London .

7. She opened a nursery for war-traumatised children

In 1941, Freud and her partner, American child psychoanalyst and educator Dorothy Burlingham, opened the Hampstead War Nursery for children whose lives had been affected by war. Many of the staff hailed from the exiled Austro-German diaspora, and all were trained in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Freud went on to publish many studies about child development based on her work at the nursery.

In 1952, Freud and Burlingham created the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic (now the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families).

Anna Freud in 1948 (left) / Dorothy Burlingham and her son Robert Jr. 1915 (right)

Image Credit: Pcgr1ff1th, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons (left) / Tiffany family collection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (right)

8. She changed the way that children are treated

Freud published many works which emphasised the importance of recognising the impact of childhood on all stages of a person’s early development. A fundamental principle of her work emphasised that children be recognised as individuals in their own right, and should be treated in ways that suited them as such. For instance, she might engage in therapy with a child by helping them write stories or by knitting clothes for their dolls.

Through her publications, talks and seminars, Freud shared her analytic understanding of children with all those who came into contact with children such as parents, teachers, nurses, lawyers and paediatricians.

9. She lectured at Yale Law School

From the 1950s until her death, Freud frequently travelled to the US to lecture and visit friends. She taught at Yale Law School about crime and family and children’s needs and the law. As a result, she co-authored three books: 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).

10. Her home was transformed into a museum

Freud died in 1982 and had her ashes placed in the ‘Freud Corner’ of Golders Green Crematorium, next to her parents’ ancient Greek funeral urn. Her life-partner Dorothy Burlingham and many other family members rest there.

In 1986, her London home was transformed into the Freud Museum , dedicated to the memory of her father.

You May Also Like

“When you receive it, your son will be gone” Stalingrad’s Last Letters

How a find in Scotland opens our eyes to an Iranian Empire

Do you know who built Petra?

The Dark History of Bearded Ladies

Did this Document Legitimise the Yorkists Claim to the Throne?

The Strange Sport of Pedestrianism Got Victorians Hooked on Coca

Puzzle Over These Ancient Greek Paradoxes

In Ancient Rome, Gladiators Rarely Fought to the Death

Archaeologists Uncover Two Roman Wells on a British Road

Young Stalin Made His Name as a Bank Robber

3 Things We Learned from Meet the Normans with Eleanor Janega

Reintroducing ‘Dan Snow’s History Hit’ Podcast with a Rebrand and Refresh

• Sign up and Get Listed

Outside of US & canada

Be found at the exact moment they are searching. Sign up and Get Listed

• For Professionals
• Worksheets/Resources
• Get Help 
• Learn 
• For Professionals 
• About 
• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Marriage Counselor
• Find a Child Counselor
• Find a Support Group
• Find a Psychologist
• If You Are in Crisis
• Self-Esteem
• Sex Addiction
• Relationships
• Child and Adolescent Issues
• Eating Disorders
• How to Find the Right Therapist
• Explore Therapy
• Issues Treated
• Modes of Therapy
• Types of Therapy
• Famous Psychologists
• Psychotropic Medication
• What Is Therapy?
• How to Help a Loved One
• How Much Does Therapy Cost?
• How to Become a Therapist
• Signs of Healthy Therapy
• Warning Signs in Therapy
• The GoodTherapy Blog
• PsychPedia A-Z
• Dear GoodTherapy
• Share Your Story
• Therapy News
• Marketing Your Therapy Website
• Private Practice Checklist
• Private Practice Business Plan
• Practice Management Software for Therapists
• Rules and Ethics of Online Therapy for Therapists
• CE Courses for Therapists
• HIPAA Basics for Therapists
• How to Send Appointment Reminders that Work
• More Professional Resources
• List Your Practice
• List a Treatment Center
• Earn CE Credit Hours
• Student Membership
• Online Continuing Education
• Marketing Webinars
• GoodTherapy’s Vision
• Partner or Advertise

• Learn About Therapy >

Anna Freud (1895-1982)

Anna Freud was an early 20th century psychologist. The daughter of Sigmund Freud , she expanded upon his work and is considered one of the founders of child psychoanalysis .

Anna Freud was born in Vienna on December 3, 1895, the youngest of six children born to Sigmund Freud and his wife, Martha. Throughout her childhood, Freud remained distant from her five siblings and especially from her sister Sophie, with whom she rivaled for her father’s attention. Many summers, Freud’s parents sent her away to health camps in order to help her overcome health problems, which may have included depression and chronic eating disorders . Freud was not close to her mother, preferring her nurse instead. She was, however, close to her famous father.

After finishing high school and training to become a teacher, Freud traveled to Italy to stay with her grandmother and to England by herself. In 1914, she began teaching at the Cottage Lyceum, the grammar school she attended as a child.

Professional Life

Anna Freud’s interest in psychoanalysis was piqued when her father began to analyze her in 1918. In 1922, Freud presented the totality of this analysis to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in a paper entitled "The Relation of Beating Fantasies to a Daydream." She became a member of the society shortly thereafter and began working with children in private practice. Within two years, she was offered a teaching position at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute. In 1927, Freud accepted a position with the International Psychoanalytical Association as Secretary, and in 1935, she took over as director of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Training Institute. The following year Freud published The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense , a book that laid the groundwork for the field of ego psychology and defined Freud as an innovative thinker.

Freud and her family fled Austria and emigrated to England in 1938 due to the Nazi invasion. She founded The Hampstead War Nursery, an institution that provided foster care and encouraged attachment and bonding for the youngest victims of the war. Eventually, Freud published her observations of how stress affected children and the importance of creating foster attachments for children whose parents were unavailable in the book Normality and Pathology in Childhood . The institute began to offer courses in 1947, and a clinic was built to offer services to children with psychological needs.

Freud spent the latter part of her life lecturing and traveled to the United States several times. She visited Yale Law School and conducted courses on crime and its effect on family relationships. This area of interest provided her with the opportunity to work with Albert Solnit and Joseph Goldstein, and the three published their collaborations in Beyond the Best Interests of the Child in 1973. Freud died in 1982.

Contribution to Psychology

Freud discovered that children often required different psychological treatment from adults and emphasized the role that early disruptions in attachment could play in the subsequent development of psychological problems. Her work studying children who had experienced abandonment or extreme neglect laid the foundation for later research into early attachments.

Freud's father had outlined the oral, anal, urethral, and phallic stages of psychosexual development, but his work was tentative and based upon the recollections of adults. Through her work with children, Freud tightened her father's theories, emphasizing that children develop through distinct developmental phases. She also outlined and expanded upon her father's theory of psychological defense mechanisms . In  The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense , Freud outlined many defense mechanisms, some of which contemporary psychologists still rely upon. A few of these defenses include:

• Repression: suppressing anxiety-provoking thoughts.
• Projection : seeing one's own negative traits in another person.
• Displacement: transferring negative feelings onto a different person. For example, a woman might displace her anger toward her mother onto her therapist. 
• Regression : reverting to a psychologically younger age. Traumatized young children, for example, might “forget” their potty training. 

Quote by Anna Freud

People Are Reading

• Dialectical Dilemmas and How ACT Models Can Help Guide Treatment
• How Emotionally Intelligent People Use Negative Emotions to Their Advantage
• Political Differences May Shorten Thanksgiving Visits
• Is ‘13 Reasons Why’ Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution?
• Time-Management Hacks to Be More Efficient and Procrastinate Less

Join GoodTherapy!

Mental health professionals who meet our membership requirements can take advantage of benefits such as:

• Client referrals
• Continuing education credits
• Publication and media opportunities
• Marketing resources and webinars
• Special discounts

Notice to users

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• Agriculture
• Armed forces and intelligence services
• Art and architecture
• Business and finance
• Education and scholarship
• Individuals
• Law and crime
• Manufacture and trade
• Media and performing arts
• Medicine and health
• Religion and belief
• Royalty, rulers, and aristocracy
• Science and technology
• Social welfare and reform
• Sports, games, and pastimes
• Travel and exploration
• Writing and publishing
• Christianity
• Share Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

Freud, anna.

• Clifford Yorke
• https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/31126
• Published in print: 23 September 2004
• Published online: 23 September 2004
• This version: 06 January 2011
• Previous version

Freud, Anna ( 1895–1982 ), psychoanalyst , was born on 3 December 1895 at Berggasse 19, Vienna, the third daughter and sixth and youngest child of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) , the founder of psychoanalysis, and his wife, Martha (1861–1951) , daughter of Berman Bernays and his wife, Emmeline . Both of Anna's parents were Jewish, but did not have any formal religious affiliations.

Education and influences

When Anna was a year old the family was joined by her widowed aunt, Minna , a woman of intellectual inclinations who, unlike Martha , was interested in Freud's developing theories and liked to discuss them with him. But, for the children, as Freud himself observed, there were now, in effect, two mothers, each with distinct family roles. A Roman Catholic nursemaid, Josefine Cihlarz , warm and empathic, took an active part in the care of the three youngest children— Anna , Ernst , and Sophie . Anna felt very close, even special, to Josefine , who was very fond not only of children but of animals too: Anna was an animal lover all her life and came to share her father's particular love of dogs. The children's upbringing was firm but lenient, and disciplined behaviour and punctuality were stressed. Sigmund Freud was an affectionate father whose love and understanding of children are also reflected in his writings. Anna was deeply attached to him and remained so throughout her life.

After private elementary schooling starting at six, when she encountered antisemitism, Anna entered the Salka Goldman Cottage Lyceum (for girls) at the age of ten. In this she followed her sisters; they were not sent to the Gymnasium —the more likely course had a university education been envisaged for them. But Anna Freud was precocious in her ability to learn and understand, and had excellent results in all her subjects. Much of her learning was stimulated at home, where she seems to have thrived in the intellectual atmosphere surrounding her father with his highly gifted friends. Though otherwise often bored, she read a great deal, wrote poetry, and, like her father, had a remarkable memory that remained at her service all her life (she never forgot the details of any case, whether treated by her or reported by others). Sigmund Freud did not hold medical training in high regard and did not envisage it for either his sons or daughters. Anna , whose interest in psychoanalysis was evident at the age of fourteen when her father introduced her to its complexities, and who subsequently was allowed to listen to the clinical papers and discussions held every Wednesday evening, came to share her father's view (later strongly expressed in The Question of Lay Analysis , 1926) that medical training did nothing to prepare the student for the unique circumstances of analytic practice.

In 1914 Anna took a holiday in England but became an enemy alien when war broke out. She returned to Vienna by a circuitous route after many adventures, finally travelling with the Austrian ambassador. In the autumn she returned to the lyceum and applied her abundant energy and keen intelligence to work as an apprentice elementary school teacher, qualifying six years later and joining the school staff. She remained an exemplary teacher—in the widest sense—all her life. In the autumn of 1918 she began an analysis with her father and in 1922 read a formal paper to the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society to become an accredited member. As such she attended the International Psychoanalytic Congress of Psychoanalysis held in Berlin in October 1922, though this was not her first visit to the German capital.

The analysis of one family member by another, or even by a close friend, later became unacceptable. Yet in 1918 Freud did not set a precedent: both Carl Jung and Karl Abraham had analysed their young daughters, and Melanie Klein analysed her sons Erich and Hans , as well as her daughter Melitta , though she was very discreet about these undertakings. Unlike Freud , however, she published their analyses, albeit under pseudonyms. No records exist of Freud's analysis of Anna . But, other considerations aside, Freud was clearly aware of the difficulties attendant on such arrangements, and these would have attracted adverse comment from others even at that time. Freud's decision seems to have been influenced by a number of practical problems, including the fact that the analysts in whom he had the greatest confidence were not in Vienna (where Anna Freud was teaching) but in Berlin and Budapest. Furthermore, the Freud family's financial circumstances were straitened at this time. The difficulties included, inter alia , Anna's idealization of him, which he did not consider an asset. But in spite of all these complexities Freud counted the analysis a success.

In 1921 Sigmund Freud invited Lou Andreas-Salomé , a woman of quite outstanding intellect and a friend of Rilke and Nietzsche , to stay at his home, and although her first visit was short she became warmly attached to Anna , and a quasi-analytic relationship developed between them and continued in and outside Berggasse 19. Andreas-Salomé was an analyst of many years' experience and Anna learned a great deal from her, as Freud himself gratefully acknowledged. The impression that Andreas-Salomé was indeed Anna's analyst was widely held, even though some of Freud's colleagues knew that he had analysed her. In 1924, at Freud's suggestion, Anna's analysis with him was restarted. Both participants were more aware of, and prepared for, attendant problems, and Anna Freud tackled this second phase with vigour and enthusiasm. An informative discussion of these analyses, including the role of Andreas-Salomé , is given by Young-Bruehl (1988).

Child psychoanalysis

Anna Freud's school career stood her in good stead for her pioneering work in child psychoanalysis. Melanie Klein , in Berlin, had already started to work in the field before moving to England in 1927 to join the British Psycho-Analytical Society at the invitation of the president, Ernest Jones . In England she became extremely influential, and though both leaders in child analysis employed a play technique with their younger patients, Klein , unlike Anna Freud , regarded this as the equivalent of free association in adults. This difference and others that became greatly intensified by the early 1930s led her to become a lifelong opponent of Anna Freud's psychoanalytic views and techniques. Exchange visits between the two capitals were arranged in an effort to resolve the differences, without appreciable success.

Anna Freud's clinical approach to children, her intellectual appeal and clarity of expression, together with her personal charm, quickly attracted a large following, and her seminars with other Viennese analysts were joined by colleagues from Prague and Budapest. Her work with pathological states of all kinds was balanced by her studies of normative development. She applied her findings to the practice of education, gave lectures on the subject to parents and teachers, and later set up with her friend and colleague Dorothy Burlingham (1891–1979) the Jackson Nurseries, for the physical and psychological care of the poorest children in Vienna. This paved the way for her future interest in paediatrics and the psychological concomitants and sequelae of physical illness in children. Her work with adults catalysed her wish to know more about adult psychiatry, and she regularly attended ward rounds at the university's psychiatric clinic, headed by the Nobel prizewinner Julius Wagner von Jauregg . She continued to publish papers, and her first book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence , was published in English in 1937, following the German edition of 1936, which she presented to her father on his eightieth birthday. It remains a major work. It distinguishes, for the first time, between instinctual drive derivatives (already recognized), and defences against painful affects (feelings and emotions), which she had freshly discovered and described.

Anna Freud in England

In 1938 the Nazis entered Vienna, and the Freud family and some of Freud's associates obtained exit visas through the good offices of Princess Marie Bonaparte of Greece (an analysand of Freud's and a family friend), while Ernest Jones secured entry permits into England. Freud was by then far from well: his cancer of the jaw was of many years' standing and he had undergone many operations. The British Psycho-Analytical Society bought a house for the family at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London, and Anna Freud nursed her father until his death in September of the following year. Martha Freud died there in 1951, and Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham remained there.

The arrival in England of the Viennese group, though welcome, sharpened the hitherto minor divisions within the British Psycho-Analytical Society , and it was clear that the differences between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein , the two leaders of child analysis, extended into the treatment of adults. The strength of disagreement led to a series of Controversial Discussions held between 1941 and 1945; the differences were never resolved, but the debate, often bitter, ended in a compromise whereby two separate training groups were organized. A split in the society, though threatened, was averted. The discussions showed plainly that there were now three broad groups of opinion: Kleinian, Freudian, and those who disagreed in some respects with both but were unprepared to accept that the differences were sufficiently important to justify a formal division. Anna Freud invariably adopted a polite, if firm, tone, and told her Viennese colleagues to keep in mind that they were visitors, if not guests. She and her colleagues considered that Melanie Klein's views were antithetical to basic Freudian principles, but it was left to Edward Glover to make the most forceful criticisms without mincing words. The fact that Klein's daughter, Melitta Schmideberg , spoke strongly against her mother's views did nothing to help the atmosphere, nor did the fact that she was analysed by Glover help to soften the tone. For her part Klein considered that she, and not Anna Freud , was Sigmund Freud's true successor. Glover resigned from the society while the discussions were still unfinished, but Anna Freud refused to follow him.

In London, Anna Freud pursued all her old interests, but, following the outbreak of war, she was deeply concerned by the plight of children made homeless by bombing, and established the residential war nurseries in Hampstead, with a branch in the country for older children. All were carefully tended and observed by a loyal residential staff. Detailed reports of this work by Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham are models of clarity and meticulous observation which graphically describe revolutionary findings about child residential care. They are collected in Young Children in Wartime (1942) and Infants without Families (1944). At the end of the war many of the staff sought further training. A course in child analysis was instituted in 1947, followed in 1952 by the foundation of the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic, to which the course became indissolubly linked. Anna Freud's work on child development, normal and abnormal, was now greatly extended, further informed, and vitally reinforced by the new facilities, which were soon the most extensive and comprehensive anywhere in the world, and resulted in a mass of important publications, many of which stemmed from the staff's own clinical research. None of this would have been possible without Anna Freud's extraordinary capacity to engage others and fire them with enthusiasm and resolve. It was largely on account of these qualities that so much was achieved at Hampstead. Many of the developmental and analytic principles arrived at through this extensive work resulted in Anna Freud's most important book, Normality and Pathology in Childhood (1965). Her voluminous writings reflected a vast field of study and investigation, including new and striking methods of psychoanalytic diagnosis and child assessment. Her contributions in the fields of education, paediatrics, and family law (collaborating with professors Joseph Goldstein and Albert Solnit of Yale University) won her many honours. She was appointed CBE in 1967, and was awarded many honorary doctorates and fellowships. She was especially proud of the MD which she received from the University of Vienna in 1975, and the PhD in 1981 from the Goethe Institute in Frankfurt where, fifty years before, her father had received the Goethe prize for literature.

Anna Freud's devotion to her father was unswerving, and she defended his basic theoretical principles throughout her life. However, she never followed him blindly, and rarely, if at all, spoke of the ‘death instinct’, preferring terms like ' destructive drive ' or ' inborn aggression '; and when, at a Hampstead public meeting, a paper was read which called for significant revision of some of Freud's views on sexual development in girls, she opened the discussion by saying: ' Well! To think we have been so wrong about this for so long! '

Anna Freud's remarkable ability to draw her students and staff into her investigations, to encourage them to work on their own ideas rather than those of others, often helped them to discover resources they did not always know they possessed. It was only possible to appreciate the compelling force of these qualities if one met them face to face. She took a close interest in the welfare of her staff and kept herself unobtrusively aware of their personal problems. Although each member came to know her, often in a different way, she was, for all that, a very private person and there were limits beyond which few cared to trespass. But she would share her jokes with them and made many a point through a telling, and sometimes disconcerting, wit. When, at a diagnostic conference held at a time when the miniskirt was fashionable, a new staff member sat in the front row displaying a rather daring length of leg, the diagnostician was describing a small boy whose intense curiosity was troubling his family. The meeting was told that the boy was in the habit of repeatedly trying to get beneath his mother's skirts. ' The time is rapidly coming ', said Anna Freud , ' when a child won't have much trouble doing that . ' But she was rarely unkind in public; and her rather rare silence during discussion was the most discomforting evidence of her strong disapproval.

Leisure interests and appearance

For all her major contributions to psychoanalysis, Anna Freud was a woman of wide interests. She was a keen horsewoman, and Dorothy Burlingham bought her a new horse for her seventieth birthday. She loved the Irish countryside, loved discovering new delights whether coastal or inland, and was devoted to the cottage owned by the two women in co. Cork. She was very popular there and loved by many who knew nothing of psychoanalysis. She enjoyed poetry in both German and English, and was particularly fond of Kipling . Detective novels were her favourite leisure reading, and she housed a substantial collection in both London and west Cork. She loved embroidery and crochet work, was an expert with a loom, and made the stair carpet for the Irish cottage. She knitted all her life, taught to do so by Josefine . Following Dorothy Burlingham's death in 1979 Alice Colonna took leave from the Child Study Center in Yale to keep Anna Freud company.

In both dress and appearance Anna Freud was almost timeless. She invariably wore a dirndl—the traditional long-skirted country dress—and blouse, both handmade with her usual skill, wore her straight hair in a simple bob, had enquiring eyes, and possessed an expressive warmth unimpaired by a measure of personal reserve. Anyone who spoke to her was sure of her exclusive attention. She aged almost imperceptibly until the last few years of her life. By 1981 she was already too ill to collect her Frankfurt award in person, being increasingly debilitated by a refractory anaemia of old age. She died at home on 9 October 1982. Her body was cremated at Golders Green crematorium on the 13th, when her ashes, appropriately, were put next to her father's.

• personal knowledge (2004)
• E. Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud : a biography (1988)
• E. Jones, Sigmund Freud : life and work , 3 vols. (1953–7)
• private information (2004)
• P. King and R. Steiner, eds., The Freud–Klein controversies, 1941–1945 (1991)
• Freud Museum, London, corresp. and MSS
• L. Cong. , MSS
• BFINA , Freud, 1930–39
• photograph, Institute of Psychoanalysis, London
• photograph, repro. in The Times (11 Oct 1982)

Wealth at Death

£335,980: probate, 5 Jan 1983, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

View the article for this person in the Dictionary of National Biography archive edition .

• Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939), founder of psychoanalysis

More on this topic

• Freud, Anna, (3 Dec. 1895–9 Oct. 1982), Psycho-Analyst; Director of Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic, since 1952 in Who Was Who

External resources

• Bibliography of British and Irish History
• National Archives
• English Heritage Blue Plaque

Printed from Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 16 September 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [81.177.182.159]
• 81.177.182.159

Character limit 500 /500

NEW EXHIBITIONS The Place I Am Not : 25 September to 20 October 2024 Women & Freud: Patients, Pioneers, Artists : 30 October 2024 to 5 May 2025

• Anna Freud’s Early Life

Anna Freud in 1896

Anna Freud was born in Vienna on 3 December 1895.

She was the youngest of Sigmund and Martha Freud’s six children.

She was a lively, imaginative child, often immersed in stories or making them up. She loved to daydream, and in later childhood would create imaginative worlds based on her favourite books.

Anna also had a reputation for mischief. Freud wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in 1899:

“Anna has become downright beautiful through naughtiness.”

An unhappy childhood

Anna Freud’s childhood was not a very happy one. Growing up in the shadow of her five older siblings, she often felt left out, and she had a difficult relationship with her mother, who could be strict and domineering. Anna later wrote: “My mother observed no rules, she made her own rules.”

Anna often turned to her father for comfort. Her childhood might be summed up in one of her most powerful early memories, of a family holiday:

“The ‘others’ all went off in a boat and left me at home, either because the boat was too full or I was ‘too little’. This time I did not complain and my father, who was watching the scene, praised and comforted me. That made me so happy that nothing else mattered.”

Perhaps these experiences prefigured her lifelong dedication to deprived children and her commitment to her father’s work.

Anna and Sophie Freud, c. 1901

Sibling rivalry

Anna had a particularly stormy relationship with her sister Sophie, who was 2½ years older and her mother’s favourite.

Sophie was more attractive, but Anna was more intelligent. Their rivalry was so fierce that the family struggled to keep the peace. It lasted until 1913, when Sophie got married and moved out of the apartment.

The family made sure that Anna was out of the country for the wedding. She was bitterly upset, but consoled by the prospect of spending more time with her father. A week before the wedding day, she wrote to him:

“I am glad that Sophie is getting married, because the unending quarrel between us was horrible for me.”

Anna finished her education at the Cottage Lyceum in Vienna in 1912 and in 1914 she travelled alone to England to improve her English. She was in England when war was declared and was recognised as an “enemy alien” and had to return to Vienna.

Discover more:

Previous chapter

• Anna Freud: Life and Work

Explore the life and work of the pioneering child psychoanalyst.

Next chapter

• Teacher Training

In 1914, Anna Freud started a teaching apprenticeship.

Become a Member

Great discounts.

Members get 10% off in the shop, and 20% off all online courses and events!

In This Section

• Anna Freud and Child Psychoanalysis
• Beyond the Consulting Room
• A New Life in England
• Anna Freud’s Later Work

Plan your visit to the Freud Museum: opening times, directions and admission fees.

Make a Donation

Please donate and help us to preserve the legacy of Sigmund and Anna Freud. Every gift, large or small, will help us build a bright future.

What’s On

Online. On Demand. Events, courses and conferences. All available worldwide.

Newsletter Signup

Be the first to hear about our events, exhibitions and other activities.

• Biographies & Memoirs
• Professionals & Academics

Sorry, there was a problem.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Anna Freud: A Biography, Second Edition Paperback – October 1, 2008

This edition of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's definitive biography of pioneering child analyst Anna Freud includes―among other new features―a major retrospective introduction by the author.

Praise for the Second Edition:

“Young-Bruehl’s description of one of the most complex but brilliant lights in psychoanalytic history has stood as a beacon to students of psychoanalytic history. It is the best most carefully crafted biography of any psychoanalyst and it illuminates the entire tradition with a clarity that only the exploration of the life of the daughter of the founder of the movement could possibly provide. It is a beautifully written insightful and remarkably edifying piece of work. The best has just got better.”-- Peter Fonagy, Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis, University College London

Praise for the First Edition:

“A gem of biographical writing. . . .”―Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune

“Lucid, erudite, briskly authoritative, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl . . . has given us the insight into character that makes biography an art.”―James Atlas

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl is a faculty member at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and a practicing psychoanalyst in Manhattan. She lives in New York and Toronto.

• Print length 576 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Yale University Press
• Publication date October 1, 2008
• Dimensions 5.5 x 1.31 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0300140231
• ISBN-13 978-0300140231
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

“Young-Bruehl’s description of one of the most complex but brilliant lights in psychoanalytic history has stood as a beacon to students of psychoanalytic history. It is the best most carefully crafted biography of any psychoanalyst and it illuminates the entire tradition with a clarity that only the exploration of the life of the daughter of the founder of the movement could possibly provide. It is a beautifully written insightful and remarkably edifying piece of work. The best has just got better.”―Peter Fonagy, Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis, University College London

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Yale University Press; 2nd ed. edition (October 1, 2008)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 576 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0300140231
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0300140231
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.4 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.31 x 8.25 inches
• #680 in Psychologist Biographies
• #181,138 in History (Books)

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 84% 0% 0% 0% 16% 84%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 84% 0% 0% 0% 16% 0%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 84% 0% 0% 0% 16% 0%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 84% 0% 0% 0% 16% 0%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 84% 0% 0% 0% 16% 16%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• About Amazon
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell products on Amazon
• Sell on Amazon Business
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Become an Affiliate
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Make Money with Us
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Amazon and COVID-19
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices

• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Anna Freud was a famous psychologist who is in most cases considered one of the founders of psychoanalytic child-psychology.

Anna’s Early Life

Anna was born on December 3, 1895, in Vienna. She was the sixth and the last child of the famous Sigmund Freud. Anna’s childhood was not a very happy one. It is said that she never had a close relationship with her own mother and actually had many challenges getting along with her siblings, especially her sister, Sophie.

Sophie was the much more attractive child and this represented a great threat in the struggle for their father’s affection. Anna may even have suffered from depression which led to eating disorders. However, the relationship between Freud and her father was totally different; they were great friends.

Anna Learns from Her Father

In her later years, Anna said that she never learned much during her schooling, but rather she learned from her dad and his many guests at home. In the process of learning from her father, she learned to speak German, Hebrew, Italian, English and French. At only 15 years old, she began reading some of her father’s works.

In 1912, she traveled to Italy and later to England. In 1914, she passed her test to become a trainee at an old school. Between 1915 and 1917, she worked as a trainee and later a teacher between 1917 and 1920. She later left teaching and in 1918, her father began psychoanalysis on her. Anna’s analysis sessions ended in 1922. The next year, she started her psychoanalytical practice with young children.

Anna’s London Years

Due to the rising harassment of Jews by Nazis, Anna Freud fled to London. The war gave Anna a chance to keenly observe the severe effects of deprivation of the parental care on young children. She decided to set up a center for child war victims. Later, Anna published a series of studies on the great effects of stress on young children.

Contributions to Psychology

In her very first book, Introduction to Technical Child Analysis , Anna explained her views on child development. While she was heavily influenced by her dad’s work, she was far from living in his shadow. Anna’s works expanded upon her father’s ideas and also created the basis for the field of child psychoanalysis.

Focusing her research on observation plus treatment of young children, Anna established a group of child development analysts who noticed that children’s symptoms were actually related to the personality disorders among grownups and therefore often related to the development stages.

In one of her books, Normality and the Pathology in Childhood , published in 1965, she summarized the study of child psychology. She also developed different techniques of treating young children that are still relevant today.

Work in Ego Psychology

Anna Freud wrote the book The Ego and Mechanism of Defense . In this book, she clearly described how defenses work, including some special attention to adolescents’ use of defense. Her focus on ego basically began in psychoanalytic circles called ego psychology.

Later Life and Death

From the 1950s until her death, Anna traveled several times to different places in U.S to lecture and visit friends. Anna Freud died on October 9, 1982 at the age of 86. She was cremated and her ashes were placed next to her parents. A year after her death, several of Anna’s collected works started to get published.

Growing Up Freudian : ANNA FREUD: A BIOGRAPHY <i> by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (Summit Books: $22.95; 492 pp.; photographs; 0-671-61696-X) </i>

• Copy Link URL Copied!

Anna Freud (1895-1982) opened the way for this brilliant account of her odyssey by carefully preserving a great variety of documentation from all periods of her life. Consistent with a tendency she once defined as “altruistic surrender,” she transformed the very data of her life into a final gift to others.

Her story begins with the unintended conception of the sixth and last child of Sigmund and Martha Freud. It continues with rejection by her mother, the many sides of her struggle as the youngest, analysis with her father, the transition from elementary school teacher to psychoanalyst, the years in which she became co-founder of the field of child analysis (separate from, but parallel with, Melanie Klein), and her continuing development--through years of war, personal turmoil and bereavement--into the world’s most lucid and exact thinker about the emotional life of children.

Using an extraordinary archive of correspondence, combined with material from published scientific papers now seen to be based on Anna Freud’s own life, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl has written a thoroughly absorbing and well-rounded book. She shows unvarying respect for her data, and no aspect of it is sensationalized.

Freud’s lifelong devotion to her father and his cause (and the achievements that are a part of that devotion) was made inevitable by the fact that it was he who analyzed her. Contemporary readers know that such an arrangement is unsound and potentially disastrous. We feel a certain sadness that the door to a more normal life was closed for young Anna Freud. She never married and never had an affair of the heart, though she was courted by a number of men, among them Ernest Jones, her father’s deputy in England, and August Aichhorn, a Viennese colleague. She eventually lived with her dear friend Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, whose children she analyzed. Her relationship with Burlingham, who became an analyst with a special interest in blind children and whom Freud called her twin, was tender and loving and, in that way, fulfilling, but it was a chaste, unsexual life. (The theme of twinship winds its way through these pages.)

Freud’s personal triumph lay in the fact that within the limits laid down in childhood, she succeeded in making a rewardingly complex and distinctly personal life of her own. She quotes one of her several mother-substitutes, Lou Andreas-Salome, as having written “that it does not matter what fate one has if only one really lives it.”

Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938 forced the Freuds to move from Vienna to London, where Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham set up the Hampstead War Nurseries. After the war, its successor, the Hampstead Child-Therapy Course and Clinic, became the world’s leading center for research and training in child analysis. Data accumulated about children of all sorts, normal ones, those with symptoms that required psychoanalysis, the handicapped and others who needed a different kind of help, generated a vast experience that showed the unlimited variety of forms a childhood may take. The clinic provided a built-in corrective to easy generalization.

Freud’s extensive writings, always clear, lively, original and diversely clinical, are a reflection of her attitude toward the study of children. She believed in direct observation in addition to treatment, with the reports of many observers of many children deepening the basis for possible conclusions. Furthermore, psychoanalysis was not seen as the only appropriate treatment for emotional conflicts in childhood. Her unparochial attitude was a corrective for the narrowness of individual experience.

For her insistence on scientific fairness, Freud was ostracized by Melanie Klein and her coterie as superficial and rigid. Although she did not--probably could not--venture deeply into writing about the mother-child relationship, she was nevertheless the most scientifically minded and lucid thinker in psychoanalysis since her father. By comparison, the Kleinian view, with its muscular insistence on having all the answers (the analytic equivalent of anabolic steroids), looks, even with its undoubted brilliance, as if it were a plot hatched in a cave; Heinz Kohut’s embrace of empathy, presumably a corrective to the traditional objective psychoanalytic attitude, looks mystical and sentimental; and Jacques Lacan’s point of view, with its tonic attention to language, is a means of proving that the French voice is more reasonable than the English one.

The details of Anna Freud’s girlhood conflicts over masturbation, her relationship to her father, the configuration of the circle around Freud, the rivalry between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein within the British Society, the struggle for child analysis to be given parity with adult analysis in the world community, the conflict over whether a medical degree is essential in the education of a psychoanalyst--all these make for compelling reading for anyone interested in the politics that attach themselves to ideas.

Anna Freud embodied the spirit not of art but of science, i.e. the search for truths, not for a means of personal expression. She wrote: “The analyst’s task is not to create, i.e. to invent anything, but to observe, to understand, and to explain.” As our century comes to an end, and, as they did in the latter stages of the 19th, people become obsessed by the mysterious and the magical, the scientific and humane legacy of Anna Freud will stand, an enduring monument to reason.

More to Read

A ghost story about new motherhood? A TV writer’s debut novel explores the female psyche

Pedro Almodóvar’s first book, like his movies, blends reality and fiction: ‘A fragmentary autobiography’

Plumbing a town’s racist legacy, Southern noir author S.A. Cosby vaults his own high bar

June 6, 2023

Sign up for our Book Club newsletter

Get the latest news, events and more from the Los Angeles Times Book Club, and help us get L.A. reading and talking.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

‘How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter’ authors say platform is ‘a tool for controlling political discourse’

Sept. 13, 2024

How to avoid feeling cynical during election season

Sept. 12, 2024

With a new memoir 20 years after breakout hit ‘Leave (Get Out),’ JoJo is back in control

The week’s bestselling books, Sept. 15

Sept. 11, 2024

Sharing Stories Inspiring Change

• Civil Rights
• Community Organizing
• Disability Rights
• Labor Rights
• LGBTQIA Rights
• Reproductive Rights
• Voting Rights
• Women's Rights
• Architecture
• Fashion and Beauty
• Photography
• Advertising and Marketing
• Entrepreneurs
• Jewish Education
• Jewish Studies
• Summer Camps
• Women’s and Gender Studies
• Food Writing
• Antisemitism
• Soviet Jewry
• World War II
• Rosh Hashanah
• Simchat Torah
• Tisha B'Av
• Tu B'Shvat
• Philanthropy
• Social Work
• Civil Service
• Immigration
• International Relations
• Organizations and Institutions
• Social Policy
• Judaism-Conservative
• Judaism-Orthodox
• Judaism-Reconstructionist
• Judaism-Reform
• Midrash and Aggadah
• Spirituality and Religious Life
• Synagogues/Temples
• Agriculture
• Engineering
• Mathematics
• Natural Science
• Psychology and Psychiatry
• Social Science
• Coaches and Management
• Non-Fiction

The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

by and with permission of the Freud Museum , London Last updated June 23, 2021

In 1920, Anna Freud (1896 – 1982) attended her first conference in the field she had entered two years earlier. She is shown here speaking at the 1934 Psychoanalytic Congress in Lucerne, Switzerland.

Photographer: Tim Gidal.

Anna Freud shaped the fields of both child and developmental psychology. Her father, Sigmund Freud, began psychoanalyzing her in 1918, sparking her own interest in psychology. She became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society in 1922 and the following year began analyzing children. From 1927 to 1934 she served as general secretary to the International Psychoanalytical Association. In 1935 she became director of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Training Institute. In 1938 she and her family fled Austria for England, where she offered foster care for children during World War II, created the Hampstead Child Therapy Courses in 1947, and established the Hampstead Children’s Clinic in 1952. In 1965 she published Normality and Pathology in Childhood , shaped by her work with children of all social brackets in peace and wartime.

Family and Education

Born on December 3, 1895, in Vienna to a Jewish family, Anna was the youngest of Sigmund and Martha (née Bernays) Freud’s six children. She was a lively child, with a reputation for mischief. She grew up somewhat in the shadow of her sister Sophie, who was two and a half years her senior, but was very close to her father, the founder of psychoanalysis.

When Anna completed her education at the Cottage Lyceum in Vienna in 1912, she had not yet decided upon a career. In 1914 she traveled alone to England to improve her English. She was there when war was declared and thus became an “enemy alien.” (Twenty-five years later, in 1939, this experience was to be repeated, but unlike other Jews at the time, she was not interned.) She returned to Vienna with the Austro-Hungarian ambassador and his entourage, via Gibraltar and Genoa. She began teaching at her old school, the Cottage Lyceum, where she was held with regard and respect.

Early Involvement in Psychoanalysis

Already in 1910 Anna had begun reading her father’s work, but her serious involvement in psychoanalysis began in 1918, when her father began psychoanalyzing her (a somewhat unusual arrangement even at the time, yet it should be remembered that this was before any treatment orthodoxy had been fully established). In 1920, they both attended the International Psychoanalytical Congress at The Hague.

Anna and her father now had both work and friends in common, some of them culturally distinguished. One such friend was the writer and psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé, who was once the confidante of Nietzsche and Rilke and who was to become Anna Freud’s confidante in the 1920s. Through her the Freuds also met Rilke, whose poetry Anna Freud greatly admired. Her volume of his Buch der Bilder bears his dedication, commemorating their first meeting. Anna’s literary interests paved the way for her future career as a psychoanalyst, a profession that she began viewing as crucial in deciphering inner life. “The more I became interested in psychoanalysis,” she wrote, “the more I saw it as a road to the same kind of broad and deep understanding of human nature that writers possess.”

Child Analysis

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 two years later was teaching a seminar at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute on the technique of child analysis. Her work resulted in her first book, a series of lectures for teachers and parents entitled Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis (1927), a seminal study of children that launched her career as one of the pioneers of child psychoanalysis.

In 1923 Sigmund Freud began suffering from cancer and became increasingly dependent on Anna's care and nursing. Later, when he needed treatment in Berlin, she was the one who accompanied him there. His illness was also the reason why a “Secret Committee” of supporters of his work was formed to protect psychoanalysis against criticism from within and from outside the emerging psychoanalytic movement. From 1927 to 1934 Anna Freud was General Secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association. She continued her child analysis practice and ran seminars on the subject, organized conferences, and, at home, continued to help nurse her father. She also acted as his representative at such public occasions as the dedication of a plaque at his birthplace in Freiberg or his award of the Goethe-Prize in Frankfurt.

In 1935 Anna became director of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Training Institute, a fact that exemplifies the openness of the new discipline of psychoanalysis to women occupying professional positions. The following year she published her influential study of the “ways and means by which the ego wards off unpleasure and anxiety,” The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence . In examining ego functions, the book was a move away from the traditional bases of psychoanalytical thought; rather than drives, it became a founding work of ego psychology and established Anna’s reputation as a pioneering theoretician.

The economic and political situation in Austria deteriorated in the 1930s. Anna Freud and her lifelong friend, and possibly her partner, Dorothy Burlingham, were concerned by the situation of the poor and involved themselves in charitable initiatives. In 1937 she had the opportunity to combine charity with her own work when the American Edith Jackson funded a nursery school for the children of the poor in Vienna. Anna and Dorothy, who ran the school, were able to observe infant behavior and to experiment with feeding patterns. They allowed the children to choose their own food and respected their freedom to organize their own play. Though some of the children’s parents had been reduced to begging, Anna wrote “we were very struck by the fact that they brought the children to us, not because we fed and clothed them and kept them for the length of the day, but because ‘they learned so much,’ i.e. they learned to move freely, to eat independently, to speak, to express their preferences, etc. To our own surprise the parents valued this beyond everything.”

Flight to England

Unfortunately, within a few months, in March 1938, the nursery had to close. Austria was taken over by Nazi Germany and the Freuds had to flee the country as Jewish refugees, despite Sigmund Freud’s ill health. Ernest Jones and Princess Marie Bonaparte provided vital assistance in obtaining emigration papers, but it was Anna above all who had to deal with the Nazi bureaucracy and organize the practicalities of the family’s emigration to London. Anna quickly settled down to work in her new home. “England is indeed a civilized country,” she wrote, “and I am naturally grateful that we are here. There is no pressure of any kind and there is a great deal of space and freedom ahead.” She was among the lucky ones among Jewish refugees at the time.

In early September 1939 the Second World War broke out, and within a few weeks Sigmund Freud died in London. Anna Freud had already established a new practice and was lecturing on child psychology in English. Child analysis had remained relatively uncharted territory in the 1920s and 1930s. Two of Anna's mentors in child psychology, Siegfried Bernfeld and August Aichhorn, had both had practical experience of dealing with children in Vienna. Melanie Klein , who ended up in England, was evolving and pioneering too her own theory and technique of early development of child analysis. She differed from Anna Freud as to the timing of the development of object relations and internalized structures; she also put the oedipal stage much earlier and considered the death drive to be of fundamental importance in infancy. After Anna's arrival in London, the conflict between their respective approaches threatened to split the British Psycho-Analytical Society. This was resolved through a series of war-time “Controversial Discussions” that ended with the formation of parallel training courses for the two groups.

After the outbreak of war Anna set up the Hampstead War Nursery, which provided foster care for over eighty children. She aimed to help the children form attachments by providing continuity of relationships with the helpers and by encouraging mothers to visit as often as possible. Together with Dorothy Burlingham, she published studies of the children under stress in Young Children in War-Time and Infants Without Families .

There was a further opportunity after the war to observe even more parental deprivation. After a group of Jewish orphans from the Theresienstadt camp came into the care of Anna Freud’s colleagues at the Bulldogs Bank home, she wrote about the children's ability to find substitute affections among their peers, in an important article titled An Experiment in Group Upbringing .

Postwar Career

In 1947 Anna Freud and the analyst Kate Friedlaender established the Hampstead Child Therapy Courses, and a children’s clinic was added five years later. Now that she was training English and American child therapists, her influence in the field grew rapidly. “The Hampstead Clinic is sometimes spoken of as Anna Freud’s extended family, and that is how it often felt, with all the ambivalence such a statement implies,” one of her staff wrote. At the Clinic, Anna and her staff held highly acclaimed weekly case-study sessions, which provided practical and theoretical insights into their work. Their technique involved the use of developmental lines charting theoretical normal growth “from dependency to emotional self-reliance,” and diagnostic profiles that enabled the analyst to separate and identify the case-specific factors that deviated from, or conformed to, normal development. In her book Normality and Pathology in Childhood (1965), she summarized material from work at the Hampstead Clinic, as well as observations at the Well Baby Clinic, the Nursery School, the Nursery School for Blind Children, the Mother and Toddler Group, and the War Nurseries. In child analyses Anna felt that it was above all transference symptoms that offered the “royal road to the unconscious.”

From the 1950s until the end of her life Anna Freud traveled regularly to the United States to lecture, to teach and to visit friends. It was there too that she found perhaps the most eager audience to her theories. During the 1970s she was concerned with the problems of working with 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, leading 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).

Honors and Legacy

Anna Freud also began receiving a long series of honorary doctorates, starting in 1950 with Clark University (where her father had lectured in 1909) and ending with Harvard in 1980. In 1967 she received an OBE from Queen Elizabeth II; in 1972, a year after her first post-war return to her native city, Vienna University awarded her an honorary medical doctorate. The following year she was made honorary president of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Like her father, she regarded awards less in a personal light than as honors for psychoanalysis, though she accepted the praise with good grace and characteristic humor; the speeches about her achievements made her feel as if she were already dead, she commented.

The publication of her collected works was begun in 1968, the last of the eight volumes appearing in 1983, a year after her death. In a memorial issue of The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis , collaborators at the Hampstead Clinic paid tribute to her as a passionate and inspirational teacher, and the Clinic was renamed the Anna Freud Centre. In 1986 her home for forty years was, as she had wished, transformed into the Freud Museum.

Anna Freud’s work continued her father's intellectual adventure. Her life was also a constant search for useful social applications of psychoanalysis, above all in treating, and learning from, children. “I don’t think I’d be a good subject for biography,” she once commented, “not enough ‘action’! You would say all there is to say in a few sentences: She spent her life with children!”

Selected Works by Anna Freud

With Dorothy Burlingham. Infants Without Families: The Case For and Against Residential Nurseries . New York: International Universities Press, 1944.

The Psycho-Analytical Treatment of Children . London: Imago Publishing Co. Ltd, 1946.

Psychoanalysis for Teachers and Parents: Introductory Lectures . New York: Emerson Books, 1947.

Das ich und die Abwehrmechanismen . München: Kindler Verlag, 1964.

Indications for Child Analysis and Other Papers, 1945–1956 . New York: International Universities Press, 1968.

The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence . London: Hogarth Press, 1968.

Research at the Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic and Other Papers, 1956–1965 . New York: International Universities Press, 1969.

Problems of Psychoanalytic Training, Diagnosis, and the Technique of Therapy, 1966–1970 . New York: International Universities Press, 1971.

Normality and Pathology in Childhood, Assessments of Development . London: Penguin Books, 1973.

Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Lectures for Child Analysts and Teachers, 1922–1935 . New York: International Universities Press, 1974.

Kranke Kinder: Ein Psychoanalytischer Beitrag zu Ihrem Verstaendins . Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1976.

Psychoanalytic Psychology of Normal Development 1970–1980 . New York: Hogarth Press, 1981.

Die Schriften Der Anna Freud . 10 volumes. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1987.

The Harvard Lectures . Ed. and annotated by Joseph Sandler. New York: Routledge, 1992.

With permission of the Freud Museum , London

Sandler, Joseph. The Technique of Child Psychoanalysis: Discussions with Anna Freud . Cambridge, Mass: 1980.

Heller, Peter S. A Child Analysis with Anna Freud . Madison, Conn: 1990.

Sayers, Janet. Mothering Psychoanalysis: Helene Deutsch, Karen Horney, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein . London: 1991.

Coles, Robert. Anna Freud Oder der Traum der Psychoanalyse . Frankfurt am Main: 1995.

More on Anna Freud

Have an update or correction? Let us know

Help us elevate the voices of Jewish women.

Listen to Our Podcast

Get sweet swag.

Get JWA in your inbox

Read the latest from JWA from your inbox.

sign up now

How to cite this page

and with permission of the Freud Museum , London. "Anna Freud." Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women . 23 June 2021. Jewish Women's Archive. (Viewed on September 16, 2024) <https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/freud-anna>.

• Art History
• U.S. History

Anna Freud was the sixth and youngest child of her famous father, Sigmund Freud. She followed her father into the field of psychology where she made highly influential contributions both to the theory of mind and to therapeutic psychology. Like her father, Anna Freud’s theories brought both praise and considerable controversy.

Anna’s Childhood Years

Anna Freud’s childhood is described as unhappy and troubled, largely due to intense rivalries with her siblings. Her mother, Martha Bernays, married Sigmund Freud in 1866. She bore all six of his children. Anna was born in 1895.

Anna’s rivalry with her sister Sophie was a classic battle between “beauty” and “brains.” Anna was extremely intelligent, but not considered attractive, while Sophie was widely regarded for her luxurious feminine looks and charm.

Anna was also disturbed in other ways. She complained to her father of being deeply troubled by her own thoughts, feelings, and fantasies. Extremely thin, she suffered from depression and may have struggled with an eating disorder.

Following Her Father’s Footsteps

Anna Freud was educated at the Cottage Lyceum in Vienna in 1912, but she said her real education came through the study of her father’s work. She had a natural facility with languages and could speak French, English, and Italian fluently in addition to her native German.

Her first job was that of teacher at her former school, the Cottage Lyceum. During these early years, she continued to suffer from depression, however, and struggled to maintain her overall health. She decided to leave teaching and to become seriously involved in learning the depths of her father’s conceptions of psychology and psychoanalysis.

Anna’s Work with Children

In an attempt to confront her own inner troubles, Anna underwent psychoanalysis by her father. Upon completing her treatment, she wrote her first academic paper – Beating Fantasies and Daydream , which she presented to the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society in 1922.

This work earned her membership in the Society and established her credentials in the field of psychology. She was able to set up her own therapeutic practice where her focus was on the treatment of children. She also began teaching child psychoanalysis techniques at the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society.

At the center of Anna Freud’s theories was the understanding and dealing with the ego. She specifically wanted to understand how the ego formulated defenses to protect itself from perceived threats from the outside — from other people, family members, from society and from one’s own unhealthy fantasies. To this end she published The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense , which became an influential document that shaped the direction of therapeutic psychological treatment for children.

Fleeing the Nazi Threat

In 1938, Freud, who was Jewish, was forced to flee her native Vienna for England as the Nazis of Germany began their widespread persecution of Jews across Europe. A year later, her father, Sigmund Freud, died in London. He had been ill with cancer for some time, and so it was Anna who organized the escape of her entire family to England. Anna was also her father’s primary caregiver through his years of battling jaw and throat cancer.

Continuing Work in Psychology

The war provided much opportunity for Anna Freud to continue her work with both the psychological treatment and study of children. The war produced large numbers of orphans and/or displaced children. She established The Hampstead War Nursery, which was a refuge and orphanage.

She was able to study the effects of the loss of father and mother figures on child personality, and formulate methods that children could use to forge new psychological bonds with other father and mother figures.

Rivalry with Melanie Klein

Freud and Klein held deep differences of theory, opinion, and approach for the proper psychological treatment of children. The impasse became so profound within the professional community that the British Psychoanalytical Society organized a series of meetings to resolve the issues. These meetings came to be known as “The Controversial Discussions.”

While no true resolution or compromise was formed between the theories of Freud and Klein, the results of the Controversial Discussions was a formulation of policies and standards within the profession of psychology. These events took place between 1942 and 1944.

Legacy and Death

Anna Freud went on to produce an enormous amount of work, publishing a number of influential books on child psychology which set forward her theories centered on ego development, the dysfunctions of the ego, and how to deal with them. Her work has always been controversial and clashed with other major schools of thought that developed concurrently with hers through the 20th Century.

Freud traveled frequently to the United States, teaching and lecturing. She died at the age of 86 in London in 1982. She never married.

Newest Additions

• Malala Yousafzai
• Greta Thunberg
• Frederick Douglass
• Wangari Maathai

Copyright © 2020 · Totallyhistory.com · All Rights Reserved. | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Contact Us