Lorna Adair ‘02

Anna Freud, the daughter and pupil of Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis and the founder of psychology, is the founder of child psychoanalysis. She was born on December 3rd 1895. It was not a joyous occasion however, Martha was ill, and Freud was overjoyed at the idea of having another daughter. In a letter to colleague and friend Willhelm Fleiss he wrote, ‘If it had been a son I should have sent you the by telegram. But it is a little girl…You get the news later.’

From the beginning, mother and daughter did not develop a strong and healthy attachment. Having been ill at her birth, Martha did not breast feed Anna, and just months after the birth, Martha went on her first holiday without the children. She left them in the care of a nursemaid Josefine, whom Anna developed a deep love for. Josefine favored Anna over her brothers and sisters whom Anna felt she did not fit in with, and that she was a ‘bore’ and always felt ‘left out’ around them (Sayers, 146).

Freud himself was a large part of Anna’s life from the very beginning. In fact, he held that her conception coincided with his discovery of psychoanalysis, and that just three months before her birth he had discovered the subconscious. Freud also favored Anna, praising her for her ‘intellectual interests’ and for her lack of ‘purely feminine activity’. However, it was not for lack of interest that Anna did not involve herself in her the web of feminine activity that Anna’s mother and her two sisters seemed to enjoy. All three of them involved themselves in pastimes such as knitting and handicrafts, and they wore beautiful clothes. In comparison Anna said that she felt ‘shabby and inconspicuous’ (Sayers, 147).

Anna was not sent to schools which would prepare her for entrance to university. She was sent to the local Cottage Lyceum, which bored her to tears. She found herself drawn towards her father’s work and had soon met all of the leading followers in the field. She begged her father to accompany him on a trip to the USA, but was left behind. Thus she found herself at home with her mother and sisters anyway, unhappy, and at odds with herself and her environment.

It was after working in a daycare center for working-class children, and taking her first teacher’s examination, that Anna made her first trip to England, in the summer of 1914. It was also at this time that Freud warned her of the attentions of a suitor by the name of Earnest Jones, and she politely dismissed his eager calls. In fact she was more taken by Jones’ mistress Loe Kann, whom she attributed her safe return to Vienna once the war broke out, and it was of Loe she now dreamed.

After her return to Vienna Anna taught at her old school while she continued to be a faithful pupil to her father. Vienna was in terrible trouble due to the aftermath of the war and was stricken with poverty. Anna had to work extra hours for food and money and after the war she worked with orphaned and homeless Jewish children. All the while, she continued to attend her father’s lectures on psychoanalysis, and after a particularly bad bout with TB Anna was forced to abandon her teaching. She instead did translation work for her father’s psychoanalytic journals. In 1920 Anna went with Freud to the Hague Congress and again he put off another suitor, Hans Lampl. He instead encouraged her friendships with older women. Anna worked on her own paper for the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and due to the fact that she did not have any patients of her own to analyze, she analyzed herself, and in imitation of her father gave it without notes.

Freud’s analysis of Anna was completed in 1922 (1918-1922) and he started to concentrate more on the role of the mother in the daughter’s life rather than the father always being the sole motivator of behavior. As Anna had now been accepted into the International Psychoanalytic Congress, she made plans to travel to Berlin and set up practice there. However, this never became a reality because Freud was diagnosed with cancer of the palate. Anna took the place of her mother and was at Freud’s side day and night as she nursed him back to health. She had narrowly missed her chance at freedom and was now to be tied to Freud all the way up to his death in 1939.

In working with her father Anna began to treat children under psychoanalysis. It was through her work that she met Dorothy Burlingham, also a psychoanalyst, and the mother of one of Anna’s patients. Dorothy moved from America to Vienna after Anna agreed to work with her son Bob. Dorothy was married, and her husband had a mental illness that she felt was affecting all of her children. Anna was soon treating all of the Burlingham children. Anna cared for the Burlinghams deeply and vicariously mothered the children through Dorothy. "I think sometimes that I want, not only to make them healthy, but also, at the same time, to have them, or at least have something of them, for myself. Towards the mother of the children it is not very different with me. Curiously enough, though, I am very much ashamed of all these things, especially in front of Papa, and therefore, I tell him nothing about it. This is only a small illustration, but actually I have this dependency, this wanting to have something, even leaving my profession aside, in every nook and cranny of my life (Bumb, 2002, para. 14)." The Burlinghams moved into the apartment above the Freud’s and Dorothy underwent psychoanalysis with Freud.

Though it is not sure what the nature of the relationship between Anna and Dorothy was, it is for sure that it was an important part of both women’s lives and that it formed and shaped who they became. They remained friends for the rest of their lives.

From 1924-1929 Anna spent most of her time taking over her father’s professional career. In 1924 she became a member of her father’s closet advisors, and in 1925 she became part of the board of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. By the end of 1925, she was the secretary. It was at this time that she was getting heavily involved with child psychoanalysis as well. In addition to her father’s work she was also interested in how the war had affected the children of Germany. She met with others in the field and discussed the issues, at the core of the discussion was the formation of the ego and the superego. Anna believed that it developed as a result of the resolution of the Oedipal complex in which the parents have the sole influence.

As Anna began to analyze more children, she began to realize that her technique did differ from her father’s analysis of adults. Children needed to be analyzed differently because their symptoms were different and were related to developmental stages. She was also noticing that she had a number of issues that she needed to work on with in herself if she wanted be a good counselor (Bumb, 2002, para. 17).

In 1937 the Freuds’ were forced to flee to England due to the Nazi invasions where they settled in Hampstead. Anna took up her work with the Hampstead War Nurseries there. At the same time Freud also became gravely ill, and just after war was declared in 1939 he died. Anna immediately went back to seeing patients, and within a year she and Dorothy had begun a childcare project that was housing over 80 children and families.

From the 1950s until the end of her life, Anna traveled to the United States often to give lectures in child psychoanalysis, to teach, and visit her friends. She was concerned with working with emotionally deprived and socially disadvantaged children. She taught seminars at Yale Law School on crime and family. Above all she continue her work in pursuing her father’s work. It was as if she was caring for him even after he died, as if she could not bear to be apart from him. "We felt that we were the first who had been given a key to the understanding of human behavior and its aberrations as being determined not by overt factors but by the pressure of instinctual forces emanating from the unconscious mind..." (Sigmund Freud Museum). "I don't think I'd be a good subject for biography," she once commented, "not enough 'action'! You would say all there is to say in a few sentences - she spent her life with children!" (Sigmund Freud Museum).

Bibliography

Bumb, J. (2002). Anna Freud. Retrieved April 20, 2002 from Women’s Intellectual Contributions to Study of Mind and Society: http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/women.html.

Sayers, Janet. Mothers of Psychoanalysis. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1991.

Sigmund Freud Museum. Anna Freud. Retrieved April 20, 2002 From Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna web site: http://freud.t0.or.at/freud/home-e.htm.