Freud, Anna

   (1895–1982)

   One of the founders of the psychoanalysis of the child, she was born in Vienna the third daughter—and youngest of six children—of Sigmund Freud. She qualified in Vienna as a teacher, was analyzed between 1918 and 1921 by her father, and followed in his wake as a theorist of psychoanalysis, joining the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1923. She opened a private psychoanalytic practice next to her father’s in the family’s spacious apartment at Berggasse 19 and wrote and lectured widely about the techniques of child analysis, publishing her first article on the subject—it was her introductory lecture to the Psychoanalytic Society in Vienna— in 1923. Her collected lectures appeared in 1927 as Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis (Einführung in die Technik der Kinderanalyse). According to psychoanalysis historian Elke Mühlleitner, "For her father, sick with cancer from 1923 on, she took over a variety of duties, traveling in his stead to congresses, conducting negotiations, and accepting on his behalf a variety of prizes, including the Goethe Prize in 1930" (Biographisches Lexikon, p. 101). After Helene Deutsch emigrated in 1935 (see Women in Psychiatry), Anna Freud became head of the psychoanalytic training institute of the society. Her main work appeared in 1936, Das Ich und die Abwehrmechanismen (The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense), which became one of the foundation stones of "ego psychology." After the Nazi Anschluss with Austria in 1938, Anna fled with her father to London, where, in collaboration with James Strachey, she supervised the preparation and translation of her father’s collected works.

   In England, she became a major figure in the psychoanalysis of the child, first at the kindergarten Hampstead War Nurseries, open between 1941 and 1945; she then founded in 1947 the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and in 1952 a clinic attached to it, the Hampstead Clinic, which she directed until her death. From 1945 on she helped edit the journal The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, and published in 1965 Normality and Pathology in Childhood. She was also known for conflicts with Viennaborn child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein who had settled in London in 1926 and viewed Anna’s arrival with displeasure.