Anna Freud ( FROYD; Austrian German: [ˈana ˈfrɔʏd]; 3 December 1895 – 9 October 1982) was a British psychoanalyst of Austrian Jewish descent. She was born in Vienna, the sixth and youngest child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. She followed the path of her father and contributed to the field of psychoanalysis. Alongside Hermine Hug-Hellmuth and Melanie Klein, she may be considered the founder of psychoanalytic child psychology.
Compared to her father, her work emphasized the importance of the ego and its normal "developmental lines" as well as incorporating a distinctive emphasis on collaborative work across a range of analytical and observational contexts.
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 her pioneering work in child psychoanalysis in London, establishing the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic in 1952 (later renamed the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families) as a centre for therapy, training and research work.
Anna Freud was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, on 3 December 1895. She was the youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. She grew up in "comfortable bourgeois circumstances." Anna Freud appears to have had a comparatively unhappy childhood, in which she "never made a close or pleasurable relationship with her mother, and was instead nurtured by their Catholic nurse Josephine". She found it particularly difficult to get along with her eldest sister, Sophie; "the two young Freuds developed their version of a common sisterly division of territories, 'beauty' and 'brains', and their father once spoke of her "age-old jealousy of Sophie." As well as this rivalry between the two sisters, Anna had become "a somewhat troubled youngster who complained to her father in candid letters how all sorts of unreasonable thoughts and feelings plagued her". According to Young-Bruehl, Anna's communications imply a persistent, emotionally-caused cognitive disturbance, and perhaps a mild eating disorder. She was repeatedly sent to health farms for "thorough rest, salutary walks, and some extra pounds to fill out her all-too-slender shape".
The close relationship between Anna and her father was different from the rest of her family. She was a lively child with a reputation for mischief. Freud wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in 1899: "Anna has become downright beautiful through naughtiness." In adolescence, she took a precocious interest in her father's work and was allowed to sit in on the meetings of the newly established Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, which Freud convened at his home.
Enrolled at the Cottage Lyceum, a secondary school for girls in Vienna, Anna made good progress in most subjects. The steady flow of foreign visitors to the Freud household inspired Anna to emulate her father by becoming proficient in different languages, and she soon mastered English and French and acquired some basic Italian. The positive experience she had at the Lyceum led to her initial choice of teaching as a career. After she left the Lyceum in 1912, she took an extended vacation over the winter months in Italy. This proved to be, for a period, a time of self-doubt, anxiety, and uncertainty about her future. She shared these concerns in correspondence with her father, whose writings she had begun reading. In response, he provided reassurance, and in the spring of 1913, he joined her for a tour of Verona, Venice, and Trieste.
A visit to Britain in the autumn of 1914, chaperoned by her father's colleague Ernest Jones, became of concern to Freud when he learned of the latter's romantic interest. His advice to Jones, in a letter of 22 July 1914, was that his daughter "does not claim to be treated as a woman, being still far away from sexual longings and rather refusing man. There is an outspoken understanding between me and her that she should not consider marriage or the preliminaries before she gets two or three years older".
In 1914, she passed her teaching examination and began work as a teaching apprentice at her old school, the Cottage Lyceum. From 1915 to 1917, she worked as a teaching apprentice for third, fourth, and fifth graders. For the school year 1917–18, she began "her first venture as Klassenlehrerin (head teacher) for the second grade". For her performance during the school years 1915–18, 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 the fall of 1918.
Having contracted tuberculosis during 1918, and thereafter experiencing multiple episodes of illness, she resigned her teaching post in 1920.
With the encouragement and assistance of her father, she pursued her exploration of psychoanalytic literature, and in the summer of 1915, she undertook her first translation work for the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, translating papers by James Jackson Putnam (into German) and Hermine Hug-Hellmuth (into English). During 1916 and 1917, she attended the lectures on psychoanalysis her father gave at the University of Vienna. By 1918, she had gained his support to pursue training in psychoanalysis, and she went into analysis with him in October of that year.
As well as in the periods of analysis she had with her father (from 1918 to 1921 and from 1924 to 1929), their filial bond became further strengthened after Freud was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw in 1923, for which he would need numerous operations and the long-term nursing assistance that Anna provided. She also acted as his secretary and spokesperson, notably at the bi-annual congresses of the International Psychoanalytical Association, which Freud was unable to attend after 1922.
At the outset of her psychoanalytic practice, Anna found an important friend and mentor in the person of her father's friend and colleague, Lou Andreas-Salome. After she came to stay with the Freuds in Vienna in 1921, they began a series of consultations and discussions that continued both in Vienna and in visits Anna made to Salome's home in Germany. As a result of the relationship, Anna gained confidence both as a theorist and as a practitioner.
In 1922, Anna Freud presented her paper "Beating Fantasies and Daydreams" to the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society and became a member of the society. According to Ruth Menahem, the case presented, that of a 15-year-old girl, is in fact her own, since at that time she had no patients yet. In 1923, she began her own psychoanalytical practice with children and by 1925 she was teaching at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute on the technique of child analysis, her approach to which she set out in her first book, An Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis, published in 1927.
Among the first children Anna Freud took into analysis were those of Dorothy Burlingham. In 1925, Burlingham, heiress to the Tiffany luxury jewellery retailer, had arrived in Vienna from New York with her four children. She entered analysis first with Theodore Reik and then, with a view to training in child analysis, with Sigmund Freud himself. Anna and Dorothy soon developed "intimate relations that closely resembled those of lesbians", though Anna "categorically denied the existence of a sexual relationship". 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 a family friend, Eva Rosenfeld, who ran a foster care home in the Hietzing district of Vienna. Rosenfeld provided the space on the grounds of her house, and Burlingham funded the building and equipping of the premises. The objective was to provide a psychoanalytically informed education, and Anna contributed to the teaching. Most pupils were either in analysis themselves, or were children of analysands or practitioners. Peter Blos and Erik Erikson joined the staff of the Hietzing school at the beginning of their psychoanalytic careers, Erikson entering into a training analysis with Anna. The school closed in 1932.