Anna Freud

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Lore & Background

Anna Freud grew up in "comfortable bourgeois circumstances" in Vienna but had a comparatively unhappy childhood, in which she "never made a close or pleasurable relationship with her mother, and was instead nurtured by their Catholic nurse Josephine." She found it particularly difficult to get along with her eldest sister Sophie; her father once spoke of her "age-old jealousy of Sophie." She complained to her father in candid letters about "all sorts of unreasonable thoughts and feelings" that plagued her. She was repeatedly sent to health farms for "thorough rest, salutary walks, and some extra pounds to fill out her all-too-slender shape." Enrolled at the Cottage Lyceum, a secondary school for girls in Vienna, she made good progress in most subjects and mastered English and French, acquiring some basic Italian. After leaving the Lyceum in 1912, she took an extended vacation in Italy, a time of self-doubt, anxiety, and uncertainty about her future. In 1914, she passed her teaching examination and began work as a teaching apprentice at her old school. From 1915 to 1917 she worked as a teaching apprentice for third, fourth, and fifth graders, and for the school year 1917–18 she began her first venture as Klassenlehrerin (head teacher) for the second grade. She was praised for her "gift for teaching" by her superior Salka Goldman and invited to stay on with a regular four-year contract starting in fall 1918. Having contracted tuberculosis during 1918, she resigned her teaching post in 1920. Encouraged and assisted by her father, she pursued psychoanalytic literature. In summer 1915 she undertook her first translation work for the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, translating papers by James Jackson Putnam (into German) and Hermine Hug-Hellmuth (into English). During 1916 and 1917 she attended her father's lectures at the University of Vienna. By 1918 she had gained his support to pursue training in psychoanalysis, and she went into analysis with him in October 1918. She also had periods of analysis with him from 1924 to 1929. After Freud was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw in 1923, she provided long-term nursing assistance and acted as his secretary and spokesperson at the bi-annual congresses of the International Psychoanalytical Association. In 1922 she presented her paper "Beating Fantasies and Daydreams" to the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society and became a member. In 1923 she began her own psychoanalytical practice with children, and by 1925 she was teaching at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute on the technique of child analysis. Among the first children she took into analysis were those of Dorothy Burlingham. After the Burlinghams moved into the same apartment block as the Freuds in 1929, Anna became, in effect, the children's step-parent. In 1930, Anna and Dorothy bought a cottage together. In 1927, Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham set up a new school in collaboration with Eva Rosenfeld, who ran a foster care home in the Hietzing district of Vienna. The school closed in 1932. Anna's first clinical case was that of her nephew Ernst, the eldest son of Sophie and Max Halberstadt. She made regular trips to Hamburg for analytical work with Ernst and arranged his transfer to a more appropriate school. In 1928 she persuaded the parties concerned that a permanent move to Vienna was in Ernst's best interests. In 1937, Freud and Burlingham launched a new project, establishing a nursery for children under the age of two, funded by Edith Jackson.

Reader's Guide

Anna Freud's significance lies in her foundational role in psychoanalytic child psychology, alongside Hermine Hug-Hellmuth and Melanie Klein. Her work emphasized the importance of the ego and its normal "developmental lines" and incorporated a distinctive emphasis on collaborative work across analytical and observational contexts. She set out her approach to child analysis in her first book, *An Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis*, published in 1927. After the Freud family were forced to leave Vienna in 1938 with the advent of the Nazi regime in Austria, she resumed her psychoanalytic practice and pioneering work in child psychoanalysis in London. In 1952 she established the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic (later renamed the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families) as a centre for therapy, training and research work. She also found an important friend and mentor in Lou Andreas-Salome, who stayed with the Freuds in Vienna in 1921, leading to consultations and discussions that continued in Vienna and in visits to Salome's home in Germany. As a result, Anna gained confidence both as a theorist and as a practitioner.

Did You Know?

• Anna Freud was the sixth and youngest child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays.
• She was repeatedly sent to health farms for 'thorough rest, salutary walks, and some extra pounds to fill out her all-too-slender shape.'
• She went into psychoanalysis with her father from 1918 to 1921 and again from 1924 to 1929.
• In 1927, she co-founded a school in Hietzing with Dorothy Burlingham and Eva Rosenfeld, providing psychoanalytically informed education.
• After the Freud family left Vienna in 1938 due to the Nazi regime, she established the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic in London in 1952.

Childhood in the Freud Household

Anna Freud entered the world on 3 December 1895 in Vienna, the sixth and youngest child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. Her upbringing unfolded in comfortable middle-class surroundings, yet her emotional landscape was far from settled. She struggled to form a warm bond with her mother and was largely raised by a Catholic nurse named Josephine. Her relationship with her eldest sister Sophie was marked by a persistent rivalry that their father himself acknowledged, describing an age-old jealousy between the two. Anna's candid letters to her father reveal a troubled young person wrestling with intrusive thoughts and feelings, and she was repeatedly sent away to health farms for rest and to gain weight. Despite these difficulties, she was a lively, mischievous child whose father once playfully told a friend that she had become downright beautiful through naughtiness. Her precocious curiosity about her father's intellectual world led her to sit in on the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society meetings convened in their home, planting the seed for her future path.

From Classroom to Couch

Before psychoanalysis claimed her, Anna Freud carved out a brief career in education. She passed her teaching examination in 1914 and spent several years as an apprentice and then head teacher at the Cottage Lyceum, where her supervisor praised her natural gift for the classroom. A bout of tuberculosis in 1918 and subsequent illnesses forced her to resign in 1920, redirecting her life entirely. With her father's encouragement, she dove into psychoanalytic literature, translating papers for the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society as early as the summer of 1915, and attended her father's university lectures during 1916 and 1917. By October 1918, she had entered analysis under Sigmund Freud himself. A crucial turning point arrived in 1921, when the writer and psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salome took Anna under her wing, offering consultations and discussions that bolstered her confidence as both theorist and practitioner. After Freud's jaw cancer diagnosis in 1923, Anna's role expanded dramatically: she became his primary caregiver, his secretary, and his public spokesperson at international congresses he could no longer attend.

Exile and Rebuilding in London

The rise of the Nazi regime in Austria in 1938 shattered the Freud family's life in Vienna, forcing them to flee. Anna Freud, like her father, had to leave behind everything she had built in the Austrian capital. Yet rather than allowing displacement to define her, she re-established her psychoanalytic practice in London and threw herself into the work she had pioneered: the treatment and study of children. This commitment culminated in 1952 with the founding of the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic, an institution dedicated to therapy, professional training, and research in child psychoanalysis. The clinic was later renamed the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families, a permanent institutional tribute to her vision. Her London years thus represented not merely a geographical relocation but a full recommitment to her core mission of understanding children's inner lives and developing collaborative, observation-based methods to help them. Resuming her practice after such upheaval speaks to a resilience that ran parallel to the intellectual rigor she brought to her field.

A Distinctive Theoretical Voice

While Sigmund Freud's name dominates popular understanding of psychoanalysis, Anna Freud carved out a clearly identifiable theoretical territory of her own. Where her father's framework often foregrounded the id and its drives, Anna placed the ego at the center of her inquiry, tracing what she called its developmental lines: the orderly, progressive stages through which a child's sense of self matures. She also championed a collaborative ethos, insisting that analytical insight should be built across multiple contexts, including formal analysis, direct observation, and interdisciplinary dialogue, rather than the solitary work of a single analyst in a consulting room. Alongside Hermine Hug-Hellmuth and Melanie Klein, she is recognized as a foundational figure in psychoanalytic child psychology, a subfield that did not exist in any organized form before her generation. Her 1922 paper Beating Fantasies and Daydreams, presented to the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, marked one of her earliest public contributions and signaled a mind already pushing beyond the boundaries of her father's original formulations.