Anna Freud

Anna Freud was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, on 3 December 1895, the sixth and youngest child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. A British psychoanalyst of Austrian Jewish descent, she grew up inside a household closely tied to the new field of psychoanalysis. As an adolescent, she was allowed to sit in on meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, which her father convened at home. She later followed his path, while making her own mark in the study and treatment of children.

Her childhood was not described as easy. She had a difficult relationship with her mother, was nurtured by the family’s Catholic nurse Josephine, and struggled with rivalry with her eldest sister, Sophie. She was a lively child, known for mischief, and also a young person troubled by “unreasonable thoughts and feelings,” which she described in letters to her father. At the Cottage Lyceum, a secondary school for girls in Vienna, she did well in most subjects. The many foreign visitors to the Freud home helped inspire her interest in languages, and she mastered English and French, with some basic Italian.

Before psychoanalysis became her main work, Freud chose teaching. In 1914 she passed her teaching examination and began as a teaching apprentice at the Cottage Lyceum. From 1915 to 1917 she worked with third, fourth, and fifth graders, and in 1917–18 she took on her first post as head teacher for the second grade. Her superior, Salka Goldman, praised her “gift for teaching” and invited her to stay on with a regular four-year contract. Illness changed that plan. After contracting tuberculosis in 1918 and experiencing further episodes of illness, she resigned her teaching post in 1920.

With encouragement and assistance from her father, Freud moved more deeply into psychoanalytic work. In 1915 she began translation work for the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, translating papers by James Jackson Putnam and Hermine Hug-Hellmuth. In 1916 and 1917 she attended Sigmund Freud’s lectures on psychoanalysis at the University of Vienna. She entered analysis with him in 1918, and their bond became even closer after he was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw in 1923. She provided long-term nursing help, and also acted as his secretary and spokesperson, especially at congresses of the International Psychoanalytical Association after he could no longer attend.

Freud presented “Beating Fantasies and Daydreams” to the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society in 1922 and became a member of the society. In 1923 she began her own psychoanalytical practice with children, and by 1925 she was teaching at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute on the technique of child analysis. Her first book, An Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis, appeared in 1927. Alongside Hermine Hug-Hellmuth and Melanie Klein, she may be considered a founder of psychoanalytic child psychology. Compared with her father, her work placed more emphasis on the ego, normal “developmental lines,” and collaborative work across analytical and observational settings.

In 1938, after the Nazi regime came to power in Austria, the Freud family was forced to leave Vienna. In London, Anna Freud resumed her psychoanalytic practice and her work in child psychoanalysis. In 1952 she established the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic, later renamed the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families, as a center for therapy, training, and research. She died on 9 October 1982. Her words still resonate because they speak plainly to inner strength and self-knowledge: “I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence, but it comes from within. It is there all the time.”