Anna Freud

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Anna Freud bigraphy, stories - Psychologists

Anna Freud : biography

3 December 1895 – 9 October 1982

Anna Freud (3 December 1895 – 9 October 1982) was the sixth and last child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. Born in Vienna, she followed the path of her father and contributed to the newly born field of psychoanalysis. Alongside Melanie Klein, she may be considered the founder of psychoanalytic child psychology: as her father put it, child analysis ‘had received a powerful impetus through "the work of Frau Melanie Klein and of my daughter, Anna Freud"’.Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Times (London 1988) p. 469 Compared to her father, her work emphasized the importance of the ego and its ability to be trained socially.

Major contributions to psychoanalysis

Anna Freud’s first article, ‘on beating fantasies, drew in part on her own inner life, but th[at]…made her contribution no less scientific’.Gay, Freud p. 436 In it she explained how ‘Daydreaming, which consciously may be designed to suppress masturbation, is mainly unconsciously an elaboration of the original masturbatory fantasies’.Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London 1946) p. 232 Freud had earlier covered very similar ground in ‘"A Child is Being Beaten"’ – ‘they both used material from her analysis as clinical illustration in their sometimes complementary papers’Phillips, Flirtation p. 97 – in which he highlighted a female case where ‘an elaborate superstructure of day-dreams, which was of great significance for the life of the person concerned, had grown up over the masochistic beating-phantasy…[one] which almost rose to the level of a work of art’.Sigmund Freud, On Psychopathology (Middlesex 1987) p. 176-7

‘Her views on child development, which she expounded in 1927 in her first book, An Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis, clashed with those of Melanie Klein…[who] was departing from the developmental schedule that Freud, and his analyst daughter, found most plausible’.Gay, Freud p. 540-1 and p. 468 In particular, Anna Freud’s belief that ‘In children’s analysis, the transference plays a different role… and the analyst not only "represents mother" but is still an original second mother in the life of the child’Fenichel, Neurosis p. 576 became something of an orthodoxy over much of the psychoanalytic world.

For her next major work in 1936, her ‘classic monograph on ego psychology and defense mechanisms, Anna Freud drew on her own clinical experience, but relied on her father’s writings as the principal and authoritative source of her theoretical insights’.Gay, Life p. 441 Here her ‘cataloguing of regression, repression, reaction formation, isolation, undoing, projection, introjection, turning against the self, reversal and sublimation’Paul Brinich/Christopher Shelley, The Self and Personality (Buckingham 2002) p. 27 helped establish the importance of the ego functions and the concept of defense mechanisms, continuing the greater emphasis on the ego of her father — ‘We should like to learn more about the ego’Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology (Penguin 1987) p. 357 — during his final decades.

Special attention was paid in it to later childhood and adolescent developments — ‘I have always been more attracted to the latency period than the pre-Oedipal phases’Anna Freud, quoted in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud (London 1989) p. 455 – emphasising how the ‘increased intellectual, scientific, and philosophical interests of this period represent attempts at mastering the drives’.Fenichel Neurosis p. 112 The problem posed by physiological maturation has been stated forcefully by Anna Freud. "Aggressive impulses are intensified to the point of complete unruliness, hunger becomes voracity… The reaction-formations, which seemed to be firmly established in the structure of the ego, threaten to fall to pieces".Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (Middlesex 1973) p. 298

Selma Fraiberg’s tribute of 1959 that ‘The writings of Anna Freud on ego psychology and her studies in early child development have illuminated the world of childhood for workers in the most varied professions and have been for me my introduction and most valuable guideSelma Fraiberg, The Magic Years (New York 1987) p. xii spoke at that time for most of psychoanalysis outside the Kleinian heartland.