Anna Freud

Anna Freud (Vienna, 1895 - London, 1982) was a psychoanalyst and the youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud. Together with Hermine Hug-Hellmuth and Melanie Klein, she is usually regarded as one of the founders of child psychoanalysis. Where her father had focused on the id, she placed the ego at the centre of her work, along with its defence mechanisms and the normal development of the child, and this shift gave her output a distinct profile within the Freudian tradition.

She grew up in a comfortable bourgeois household in Vienna. Her relationship with her mother, Martha Bernays, was distant, and she grew closer to her father, who let her sit quietly in on the meetings of the psychoanalytic society held at their home. After school she considered teaching and worked as a teacher until tuberculosis forced her to stop in 1920. Between 1918 and 1922 she was analysed by her father, and in 1922 she joined the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society as a specialist in children. By 1925 she was teaching child analysis technique at the Vienna training institute, and in 1927 she published her first major work on the subject.

Her work linked clinical practice with education. With Dorothy Burlingham, a close and complicated companion for decades, she helped set up a psychoanalytically informed school in the Hietzing district of Vienna in 1927. That same year the London symposium laid out the theoretical and technical differences between her and Melanie Klein. Freud backed his daughter, while Klein received support first from Karl Abraham and later from Ernest Jones.

In 1936 she published The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, which described how the ego shields the person from anxiety through defences such as repression, projection and regression. A year later she opened the Jackson Nursery in Vienna to observe the earliest years of life at first hand. The Freud family left Vienna in 1938, after Hitler's troops arrived, and settled in London with help from Jones, Marie Bonaparte and Dorothy Burlingham. There she looked after her father during his illness and, after his death, ran residences for evacuated and refugee children during the war.

In 1952 she founded the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic in London, which combined therapy, training and research and is now known as the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families. Her concept of developmental lines, which describes child growth as a sequence of stages, remains part of developmental psychology and clinical work with children. Children in the Hospital is another of her notable works. She died in London in 1982.