Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud, significantly advanced the field of child psychoanalysis. She emphasized the importance of the ego and its defensive mechanisms, helping to elucidate how children’s emotional conflicts influence their development. Additionally, she founded the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic in London, contributing to the establishment of psychoanalytic child therapy as a distinct discipline.
Defense Mechanisms
One of Anna Freud’s major contributions was expanding the concept of defense mechanisms.
These are unconscious strategies the ego uses to reduce anxiety and cope with internal conflicts or external stress.
In her 1936 book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, she described many ways people defend themselves psychologically. Some common defense mechanisms she identified include:
- Repression: Pushing distressing thoughts or memories out of conscious awareness. (For example, a person who experienced a trauma may unconsciously forget the event as a way to avoid the pain.)
- Denial: Refusing to accept reality or a fact, acting as if a painful event doesn’t exist. (For instance, someone with a serious illness might insist they are healthy.)
- Projection: Attributing one’s own unacceptable feelings to someone else. (For example, a person who is angry at their friend may accuse the friend of being angry at them.)
- Displacement: Redirecting an impulse from a threatening target to a safer one. (For instance, a person criticized by a boss might go home and yell at their family instead.)
- Regression: Reverting to behaviors of an earlier developmental stage under stress. (For example, a potty-trained child might start bed-wetting again after a sibling’s birth.)
- Reaction Formation: Behaving in a way opposite to one’s true feelings, often to keep them hidden. (For instance, a person who resents someone may act extremely friendly toward them.)
- Sublimation: Channeling an unacceptable impulse into a socially acceptable or productive activity. (For example, using anger or aggressive energy to excel in sports or to create art.)
Defense Mechanisms Are Universal
Anna Freud showed that everyone uses defense mechanisms, not just people with psychological disorders.
She believed these defenses are a normal part of ego development and help us cope with life’s demands.
However, if overused or too rigid, defense mechanisms can lead to unhealthy behavior or emotional problems.
Therapists influenced by Anna Freud pay attention to which defenses a person uses.
This helps them understand a client’s inner conflicts and respond in healthier ways.
Child Psychoanalysis
Another central part of Anna Freud’s work was child psychoanalysis.
She was one of the first to develop a formal approach for treating and understanding children through a psychoanalytic lens.
She recognized that children are not the same as adults in therapy and adapted techniques to suit their developmental level.
Anna Freud’s child psychoanalysis approach was both therapeutic and educational.
She not only treated children’s emotional difficulties but also taught parents and other caregivers about normal developmental stages and how to support children through challenges.
Her work during World War II with orphaned and evacuated children also demonstrated how trauma and separation affect development.
It reinforced the idea that a stable, loving environment is crucial for children’s emotional well-being.
- Adapting Theory: True interpretive therapy waits until the latency period, around age 6; younger children benefit more from a supportive, well-organized environment.
- Therapeutic Alliance: Anna Freud built trust with child patients first, since unlike adults they rarely seek therapy on their own.
- Play and Creativity: She replaced the analytic couch with toys, drawing, and games, treating play as the child’s version of free association.
- Individuality: She tailored her approach to each child, such as writing stories with one boy or knitting doll clothes with a girl.
- Developmental Lines: She tracked growth across separate pathways, like dependence-to-self-reliance, to tell normal variation from a genuine problem.
1. Adapting Freud’s theories for children:
Anna Freud believed the basic ideas of psychoanalysis apply to children, including the importance of early experiences and unconscious conflicts.
But she argued the therapy methods themselves must be modified.
For example, she suggested that true psychoanalytic therapy be done once a child reaches the latency period (around age 6 and up).
Before age 6, rather than using formal analysis, the focus should be on guiding the child’s environment.
Consistent caregivers, home life, and routines support healthy development and prevent problems from taking root.
In other words, very young children benefit more from a nurturing environment and supportive guidance than traditional talk therapy.
2. Therapeutic alliance with children:
Anna Freud emphasized building a strong trusting relationship with child patients.
Unlike adults, children usually do not seek therapy on their own, and they may feel uneasy about being brought in against their will.
She would spend time joining the child’s world: playing with them, listening to their stories, and engaging in their interests.
This helped the child feel comfortable and safe with the therapist.
This trust was seen as a foundation before addressing any deeper emotional issues.
3. Use of play and creativity in therapy:
In adult psychoanalysis, patients often lie on a couch and free-associate (say whatever comes to mind).
Anna Freud found that this doesn’t work for children, who have shorter attention spans and different ways of communicating.
She rarely used the couch for kids. Instead, she allowed children to move freely during sessions and provided toys, games, and art materials.
A child might draw pictures or play with dolls.
Anna Freud viewed these activities as meaningful forms of expression that could reveal the child’s feelings and thoughts.
Playing could serve as the child’s version of free association.
For example, if a child was upset about something, it might come out through the themes in their drawings or pretend play.
4. Respect for the child’s individuality:
Anna Freud treated each child as a person in their own right, with unique needs and personality.
She tailored her approach to fit the child.
Historical notes describe how she helped one shy boy by collaboratively writing down his imaginative stories, supporting his way of expression.
In another case, she engaged a little girl by knitting clothes for the child’s doll.
These individualized interactions helped form a connection and addressed each child’s specific emotional needs.
5. Studying normal development:
In addition to therapy, Anna Freud was very interested in how healthy children grow and what is considered normal behavior at different ages.
She introduced the idea of “developmental lines,” which are pathways describing a child’s progress from infancy to maturity in various areas.
For example, one developmental line goes from total dependence on caregivers to increasing emotional self-reliance.
No child moves evenly on every line.
Another line goes from the messy toddler stage of feeding to learning independent and rational eating habits.
Yet another line might trace how children move from uncontrollable impulses to developing self-control (like from early toilet accidents to proper bladder and bowel control).
The purpose was diagnostic.
By mapping out these typical progressions, such as dependency to independence or play to work, Anna Freud built a framework for tracking a child’s trajectory.
It could show whether a child was on a healthy path, or stuck and regressing.
This helps caregivers and professionals distinguish between a passing developmental phase and a potential problem that might need attention.
Who Was Anna Freud?
- Known For: Founder of child psychoanalysis and contributed to ego and adolescent psychology.
- Born: December 3, 1895, in Vienna, Austria.
- Died: October 9, 1982, in London, England.
- Parents: Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays.
- Contributions: Anna Freud became a major force in British psychology, specializing in the application of psychoanalysis to children. Among her best-known works are The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936).
- Hampstead Clinic: She established the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic (1952, now known as the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families).
- Parent Guidance: She promoted parent guidance and school consultation as important functions of the child therapist.
Her lifetime of clinical work with children earned Anna Freud recognition as the founder of child psychoanalysis.
In her own words, she didn’t think “I’d be a good subject for biography, not enough ‘action’! You would say all there is to say in a few sentences – she spent her life with children!”
Even in such a simple summary of her life, she greatly expanded her psychoanalytical thought.
Ego psychology is the school of psychodynamic thought that shifted the focus of analysis from the id’s drives to the ego’s coping strategies.
Her contribution to it consisted of describing various mechanisms of defense, including repression (the principal human defense mechanism), projection, and regression.
This refocused analysis on the ego.
Her clinical experience and publications revealed how children’s developmental stages differ from adults’, giving clinicians practical techniques for treating young patients.
Early Life
Anna Freud was the Austrian-British founder of child psychoanalysis. She was the sixth and the youngest of Martha and Sigmund Freud’s children (Sigmund Freud Museum).
Like her father, Sigmund Freud, she contributed to the field of psychoanalysis.
But her particular focus on children changed how children are treated across many fields.
Anna did not have a meaningful relationship with her mother, and she was jealous of her elder sister’s beauty.
Even so, her father described her as a lively child. In an 1899 letter to a friend, he wrote that “Anna has become downright beautiful through naughtiness” (Sigmund Freud Museum).
Anna Freud finished her education at Cottage Lyceum in Vienna in 1912 while uncertain of her career.
She moved to England two years later to improve her English.
The visit was short-lived.
World War I forced her back to Vienna, where she began teaching at her alma mater in 1917 (Sigmund Freud Museum).
Her further studies consisted of learning from her father’s psychoanalysis work and practical experiences. She became a child psychoanalyst without a medical degree.
Career: Timeline of Contributions
1922
Anna Freud presented her first paper, Beating Fantasies and Daydreams, and became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society (Sandler, 2015).
Much of the material she analyzed was drawn from her own inner life, the beginning of the extended self-analysis her father guided her through in these years.
In her paper, she explained that “Daydreaming, which consciously may be designed to suppress masturbation, is mainly unconsciously an elaboration of the original masturbatory fantasies” (Fenichel, 1945, p. 232)
1923-1925
She established her psychoanalytic practice with children and became an instructor at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute.
During this time, Anna also began to nurse her father as he became a patient of cancer (Sigmund Freud Museum).
His jaw cancer had first been diagnosed in 1923.
She would go on nursing him through the sixteen years of illness that followed, even as she balanced it with her own growing practice.
1925-1934
Anna became the Secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and continued her child analyses while lecturing on the subject and organizing conferences.
She also nursed her father and publicly represented him on various occasions, including award ceremonies (Sandler, 2015).
Anna’s work at the Training Institute resulted in her first book, Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis.
It compiled lectures for teachers, parents, and other caregivers.
Later, she was invited to present this publication in London, where she discovered her approach to be widely different from that of Melanie Klein.
Their methods diverged sharply.
A 1927 symposium at the British Society aired their disagreement in public for the first time. Anna Freud’s approach favored building trust through play before offering any interpretation.
Melanie Klein’s theory of object relations, built on the mother-infant relationship, treated a child’s play as directly interpretable from the very start (Taylor, 2009, p. 78).
1935-1936
Anna became the director of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute in 1935.
The following year, she published Das Ich und die Abwehrmechanismen (The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, 1937), expanding her psychoanalytic thought on the ego and its defenses.
The book became the founding work of ego psychology and still stands as a standard text today.
The scope was broad.
In this book, she describes various mechanisms of defense and how ego unconsciously protect an individual from unpleasant feelings arising from both within and outside.
Anna Freud expanded upon her father’s work by systematically classifying and analyzing defense mechanisms, including repression, regression, reaction-formation, isolation, undoing, projection, turning against the self, reversal, and sublimation.
Anna emphasized the ego’s role in managing conflicts between instinctual drives (id), moral conscience (superego), and external reality.
Anxiety was the danger signal.
She proposed that defense mechanisms are employed by the ego to alleviate anxiety arising from these conflicts.
Anna Freud underscored the developmental aspects of defense mechanisms, suggesting they emerge in a chronological order as the ego matures.
She argued that certain defense mechanisms, like projection and introjection, become available only after the ego has sufficiently differentiated from the external world.
1937-1938
With the upheavals in Austrian political and economic situations in the 1930s, Anna integrated philanthropy into her psychoanalytic work.
She supervised Jackson Nursery (funded by Edith Jackson, an American child psychoanalyst) in Vienna for economically deprived children.
In this nursery, Anna and her friend Dorothy Burlingham continued their work by observing child behavior and experimenting with their feeding patterns.
In 1938, the nursery closed when Nazi Germany annexed Austria.
Ernest Jones, a former IPA President, helped the Freud family flee to London (Sigmund Freud Museum).
1939
Within a few months of the war, Sigmund Freud passed away. By this time, Anna had established her child psychoanalytic practice in London.
He died on 23 September 1939, after the sixteen years of illness she had nursed him through.
1941
Anna, with her friend Dorothy Burlingham, established the Hampstead War Nurseries to provide foster care to children during the war.
Due to these nurseries, she was able to observe the impact of separation from families on children’s normal development.
Staff kept detailed written records of the children’s daily behavior in the nurseries.
Nothing was left to memory alone.
These observations, discussed with Anna and Dorothy each evening, shaped their growing understanding of normal and pathological child development.
Later, they recounted these observations in three publications: Young Children in War-Time (1942), War and Children (1943), and Infants Without Families (1944).
Their most striking evidence came from a study of six Holocaust-orphaned children, conducted with the psychoanalyst Sophie Dann (Freud & Dann, 1951).
Six children carried the clearest evidence.
Aim: To document how severely deprived young children develop and recover once removed from a Nazi concentration camp.
Method: The six children, orphaned as infants, had been cared for together by adult camp inmates. Freud and Dann observed them intensively after they were brought to England and cared for as a group at a rural children’s home.
The camp had left its mark.
Results: On arrival the children showed little speech and an intense attachment to one another rather than to any adult, alongside fearful hostility toward strangers. Over about a year they gradually formed attachments to specific adult caregivers and made a burst of social and language progress.
Recovery still took real time.
Conclusion: Freud and Dann described the children as “neither deficient, delinquent nor psychotic,” and said a strong peer bond had protected them despite severe early deprivation. The study had a tiny sample and no comparison group, but its detailed, long-term record of recovery is hard to obtain any other way.
1941-1945
The disagreement Anna Freud and Melanie Klein first aired in 1927 became unavoidable once both were practicing inside the same institution.
Between 1941 and 1945, during the Blitz, the British Psycho-Analytical Society held formal debates that became known as the Controversial Discussions.
The two disagreed on how much unconscious life to attribute to infancy.
Neither side would yield.
They also split over whether a young child could bear direct interpretation of their play.
Klein dated a rudimentary superego and Oedipus complex to the child’s first year. Anna Freud gave the ego a larger, more gradually developing role instead.
The Society nearly split apart.
Rather than expel either side, the Society split into three parallel training tracks. These were a Kleinian group, an Anna Freudian group, and an Independent group that drew on both traditions.
This three-way structure has shaped British psychoanalysis largely unchanged ever since (Sandler, 2015).
1947-1980
With Kate Friedlaender (a female psychoanalyst), Anna established Hampstead Child Therapy Courses and later founded a children’s clinic.
At this clinic, Anna and her staff met in weekly case discussions to track each child’s progress “from dependency to self-reliance” (Sigmund Freud Museum).
They used diagnostic profiles built from her developmental-lines framework to separate normal variation from genuine pathology.
Anna began working with children from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
She was equally committed to sharing her clinical insights with parents, teachers, and pediatricians.
She also traveled to the United States and explored the application of psychoanalytical ideas on family and crime at Yale Law school.
This participation resulted in two publications, both co-authored with Joseph Goldstein and Albert Solnit (Sandler, 2015).
Yale sharpened her legal thinking.
These were Before the Best Interests of the Child (1973) and Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973).
The two books proposed a new legal standard: the least detrimental available alternative.
Rather than asking what ideal placement might exist in principle, courts should ask which realistically available option would do a child the least psychological harm.
Time mattered most of all.
The standard weighed continuity of care heavily, along with how slowly a child experiences time compared to an adult.
Anna published Normality and Pathology in Childhood (1965), covering every stage of child development from infancy to adolescence.
She drew her evidence from personal observation at children’s clinics, alongside other child and adult analyses.
Her honors kept coming.
Anna Freud began to receive honorary doctorates from various universities, including Harvard University and Vienna University.
In 1973, she became the Honorary President of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) until her death in 1982.
1982
On October 9, 1982, Freud passed away in London. After her death, Hampstead Clinic was renamed to Anna Freud Center as a tribute and her home in London became the Freud Museum (Sigmund Freud Museum).
She has been recognized by many in her life, but she always dedicated the awards to the field of psychoanalysis rather than herself.
The clinic and the family home she left behind still stand as tributes to a legacy she spent sixty years building.
Critical Evaluation
Anna Freud established the field of child psychoanalysis and her work contributed greatly to the theory of child psychology.
She developed different techniques to treat children. She noticed that children’s symptoms differed from those of adults and were often related to developmental stages.
Anna Freud provided clear explanations of the ego’s defense mechanisms in her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936), including displacement, sublimation, and regression.
How did Freud Disagree with Klein?
| Anna Freud | Melanie Klein |
|---|---|
| Implemented storytelling in therapeutic settings. As the child expresses himself, the therapist assists in interpreting and understanding feelings. | Klein felt that young children could bear the full weight of her analytical interpretations and so she did not hold back or sugar-coat them (see her famous case study Narrative of a Child Analysis, 1961). |
| Used play as a means to build a positive relationship between the child and therapist, thus allowing the therapist better access to a child’s inner thoughts and emotions. | Klein believed play provided insight into a child’s unconscious, and used it as an analytic tool. |
| Focused on simple (less symbolic) interpretations of children’s play. She helped children consciously understand their thoughts, feelings, and behavior. | Emphasizing the role of free association through play, and as the vehicle to making interpretations directly to even very young children’s unconscious. |
| Anna emphasized the ego more in child analysis than when treating adults. | Klein focused on pre-Oedipal development. |
| Many of the noted problems in young children are related more to short-term experiences than long-term experiences. | Present behavior is caused by the past (e.g. childhood). |
Limitations of the Evidence
Anna Freud’s conclusions rest almost entirely on clinical observation rather than controlled experiment.
Her most detailed case, the study of six war-orphaned children, involved a tiny sample with no comparison group.
Freud and her colleagues were also the children’s caregivers and the study’s observers, making it hard to rule out that expectation shaped what they recorded.
Historians have also noted that Anna Freud’s own analysis was conducted by her father, a dual relationship no analytic institute would permit today.
Contemporary Research
Anna Freud proposed, from clinical observation alone, that ego defenses mature in a set order as a child grows.
The psychologist Phebe Cramer tested this claim with methods far removed from the analytic couch.
Decades separated the two.
Her 2015 review scored defenses directly from stories that children, adolescents, and adults told about standardized, ambiguous picture prompts. She used a validated coding system across large samples followed over time (Cramer, 2015).
The findings broadly supported Anna Freud’s proposed order.
Reliance on denial, the most primitive defense, was highest in early childhood and fell across adolescence. More demanding defenses, such as projection, became more common with age.
The pattern held broadly.
The evidence has limits: the picture-story measures still involve some interpretive judgment, and the findings are correlational rather than causal. Even so, a developmental idea first drawn from 1930s Vienna case material held up across forty years of later, standardized research.
One mechanism drew special interest.
Identification with the aggressor describes how a frightened person copes with a threatening figure by adopting that figure’s own aggression, turning a passive position into an active one.
Anna Freud illustrated it with a frightened boy who, after a dentist visit, took to snapping and sharpening pencils with great energy.
Researchers later tested this directly.
Aim: To test whether identifying with one’s own abuser predicts later aggression, turned both inward as self-harm and outward as violence toward others.
Method: A survey of 306 Israeli college students with a history of childhood abuse measured three facets of identifying with the aggressor (Lahav et al., 2022). It also measured PTSD symptoms, self-harm, and violent acts.
Results: All three facets were linked to both self-directed and other-directed aggression, and predicted self-injury, urges to harm others, and violent acts beyond the effects of gender and PTSD symptoms.
Conclusion: Identifying with an abuser may lead a survivor to re-enact the abusive dynamic, directing the resulting aggression at themselves as well as others.
Together with Cramer’s developmental findings, the study suggests a taxonomy assembled from 1930s Viennese case material can still generate testable predictions today.
Key Takeaways
- Youngest Daughter: Anna Freud (1895-1982) was a psychoanalyst, the youngest of Sigmund Freud’s six children.
- Ego & Defenses: She showed how the ego uses unconscious defense mechanisms, like repression and denial, to manage anxiety.
- Child Analysis: As a founder of child psychoanalysis, she adapted her father’s methods, using play and a trusting relationship rather than the couch.
- Developmental Lines: Her “developmental lines” framework tracked a child’s progress across separate areas, from dependence to self-reliance.
- Modern Evidence: A 2015 review of research using standardized story-telling measures found children’s defenses do mature in the order she proposed.
References
“Anna Freud”. (February 27, 2009). Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia . https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/freud-anna
Cramer, P. (2015). Defense mechanisms: 40 years of empirical research. Journal of Personality Assessment, 97(2), 114-122. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223891.2014.947997
Fenichel, O. (1945). The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. New York: W. W. Norton.
Freud, A., & Dann, S. (1951). An experiment in group upbringing. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 6, 127-168.
Goldstein, J., Freud, A., & Solnit, A. J. (1973). Beyond the Best Interests of the Child. Free Press.
Klein, M. (1961). Narrative of a child analysis: The conduct of the psychoanalysis of children as seen in the treatment of a ten year old boy (No. 55). Random House.
Lahav, Y., Allende, S., Talmon, A., Ginzburg, K., & Spiegel, D. (2022). Identification with the aggressor and inward and outward aggression in abuse survivors. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 37(5-6), 2705-2728. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260520938516
Reuters. (October 10, 1982). Anna Freud, Psychoanalyst, Dies in London at 86. New York Times Archive. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1203.html
Sandler, A. M. (2015). Anna Freud. Institute of Psychoanalysis: British Psychoanalytical Society.
https://psychoanalysis.org.uk/our-authors-and-theorists/anna-freud
Sigmund Freud Museum. (n.d.). Anna Freud: 1895-1982. Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna.
https://www.freud-museum.at/online/freud/themen/anna1-e.htm
Taylor, E. (2009). The Mystery of Personality: A History of Psychodynamic Theories. New York:
Springer.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (December 02, 2019). Anna Freud. Encyclopædia Britannica, inc.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anna-Freud .
Key Publications
Freud, A., & Clark, L. P. (1928). Introduction to the technic of child analysis (No. 48). Nervous and Mental Disease.
Freud, A. (1937). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (C. Baines, Trans.). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1936)
Freud, A., & Burlingham, D. T. (1944). Infants Without Families: The Case for and against Residential Nurseries. International Universities Press.
Freud, A. (1954). The widening scope of indications for psychoanalysis discussion. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2 (4), 607-620.
Freud, A. (1965). Normality and Pathology in Childhood: Assessments of Development. International Universities Press.
Freud, A. (1971). Problems of Psychoanalytic Training, Diagnosis, and the Technique of Therapy, 1966-1970 (Vol. 7). International Universities Press, Inc.
Freud, A. (1982). Psychoanalytic psychology of normal development, 1970-1980 (No. 112). Vintage.
Further Reading
