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In addition to simply providing care for the children, she hoped to provide the children with continuity in their relationships with staff and family.
Superego vs ego series#
However, during World War II, a series of discussion forums resulted in the establishment of parallel training courses for the two groups.Īfter the war began, Anna Freud helped to set up the Hampstead War Nursery to provide foster care for over 80 children, a number that rose to a total of 190 children over several years (Peters, 1985). After Anna Freud arrived to stay in England with her family in 1938, the conflict between them threatened to split the British Psychoanalytic Society. There were significant disagreements between them, including a symposium in 1927 organized specifically to provide an opportunity for Klein to publicly attack Anna Freud’s theories (Peters, 1985). In 1923 she began her own practice treating children.Īs Anna Freud was developing her theories regarding the psychoanalysis of children, Melanie Klein was developing her theories in England. In 1920 she attended the International Psychoanalytical Congress with her father, and 2 years later she was a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society and began presenting her own papers. In any case, Anna Freud subsequently became one of her father’s most unwavering supporters and an important psychoanalyst in her own right. Such a situation, a father psychoanalyzing his own daughter, would be considered inappropriate today, but at that time the entire field was still quite new and many aspects of it were still experimental. But it was not until 1918 that she entered into psychoanalysis. Freud, 1973).Įven before she graduated, Anna Freud had begun reading her father’s works. The people who follow this line of thought hold that those who analyze children should possess not only the correct analytical training and mental attitude but something further: something which is called for by the idiosyncrasies of childhood, namely, the training and the mental attitude of the pedagogue… (pg. Anna Freud considered this experience as a teacher to have been very valuable for her later career as a child psychoanalyst: Her popularity likely resulted from her own love of teaching and for her students (Coles, 1992).

She was very popular among her students, one of whom described her as “such a marvelous and simple figure that I loved her deeply at that time” (cited in Peters, 1985). Upon returning to Vienna, she became a teacher at the Cottage Lyceum’s elementary school. Since she had not chosen a career, she traveled to England to improve her English, one of several languages she had learned. She soon entered the Cottage Lyceum’s high school, graduating in 1912. She did, however, attend private schools, eventually entering the Cottage Lyceum in Vienna during fifth grade. She was quite intelligent, but never attended college. Although she always enjoyed a good relationship with her father, it was her older sister Sophie who was her father’s favorite daughter (Peters, 1985). She was a lively child, with a reputation for being mischievous. In 1971, a survey conducted among psychiatrists and psychoanalysts identified Anna Freud as the most outstanding colleague among both groups (see Peters, 1985).Īnna Freud lived with her parents until Sigmund Freud’s death in 1939.

Therefore, she was one of the first lay psychoanalysts, which is an important consideration for all mental health practitioners today (since Freud and most other early psychoanalysts were actually psychiatrists who had attended medical school). However, this did not come about immediately, and Anna Freud never attended medical school as her father had. \)Īnna Freud (1895-1982) was the youngest of Sigmund and Martha Freud’s six children, and the only one to pursue a career in psychoanalysis.
