Reading Anna Freud

Nick Midgley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136216718
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What place do Anna Freud's ideas have in the history of psychoanalysis? What can her writings teach us today about how to work therapeutically with children? Are her psychoanalytic ideas still relevant to those entrusted with the welfare of infants and young people?

Reading Anna Freud provides an accessible introduction to the writings of one of the most significant figures in the history of psychoanalysis. Each chapter introduces a number of her key papers, with clear summaries of the main ideas, historical background, a discussion of the influence and contemporary relevance of her thinking, and recommendations for further reading.

Areas covered include Anna Freud's writings on:

• The theory and practice of child analysis and 'developmental therapy'
• The application of psychoanalytic thinking to education, paediatrics and the law
• The assessment and diagnosis of childhood disorders
• Psychoanalytic research and developmental psychopathology

Nick Midgley draws on his extensive experience as a child psychotherapist and a teacher to bring Anna Freud's ideas to life. He illustrates the remarkable originality of her thinking, and shows how analytic ideas can be used not only in child psychotherapy, but also to inform the care of children in families, hospitals, classrooms, residential care and the court-room.

Reading Anna Freud will be of interest to child therapists, child analysts and psychoanalysts, as well as others working in the field of child and adolescent mental health, such as clinical psychologists, child psychiatrists and educational psychologists. It also has much to offer to those entrusted with the care of children in a wide range of settings - including teachers, nurses and social workers - for whom Anna Freud was always keen to demonstrate the value of a psychoanalytic approach.

Nick Midgley trained as a child and adolescent psychotherapist at the Anna Freud Centre, where he now works as a clinician and as Programme Director for the MSc in Developmental Psychology and Clinical Practice. Nick has written articles on a wide range of topics and is joint editor of Minding the Child: Mentalization-based Interventions with Children, Young People and their Families (Routledge, 2012) and Child Psychotherapy and Research: New Directions, Emerging Findings (Routledge, 2009).

1	INTRODUCTION Anna Freud, her life and work

Introduction: The curriculum vitae of a lay analyst

Anna Freud was born in Vienna in 1895, the sixth (and last) child of Sigmund and Martha Freud. From the very beginning, her life was inextricably linked with the history of psychoanalysis: she was born in the year that her father published his first major work (with Josef Breuer), Studies on Hysteria, and she made her first appearance in the psychoanalytic literature before the age of five, when her dream about eating strawberries was included in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900). By the age of 14 she was already sitting in on the meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and listening to the discussions taking place between Freud, Adler, Rank, Ferenczi, Jung and others; she was in her own analysis with her father at the age of 22; and by the age of 26, having already worked as an elementary school teacher for a number of years, she was herself accepted as a member of the Society, and soon took up senior positions in both the Vienna Society and the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). For the rest of her life Anna Freud was to maintain a position at the forefront of the psychoanalytic movement, becoming Honorary President of the IPA in 1973, a position that she retained until her death in 1982. When the City University of New York conducted surveys among American psychiatrists and psychoanalysts in 1971, in which they were asked to nominate their most ‘outstanding colleague’, Anna Freud’s name was at the top of both polls (Peters, 1985: xiv).

Yet despite this acclaim, Anna Freud was in certain respects a very private person. She never wrote a memoir of her life, despite the many requests for her to do so. When speaking with her old friend and colleague, Muriel Gardener, about the idea of writing an account of her life, she told her that ‘there is too much feeling bound up with the past, and above all the part of the past in which others would be interested’ (quoted by Gardiner, 1983: 65). However, at various points she did speak or write about certain key memories and experiences (most often when writing the many tributes to friends and colleagues who passed away prematurely), and she has been well-served by her biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, who has written a masterly account of her life and times (Young-Bruehl, 1988/2008).

What kind of person was Anna Freud?

As the youngest of six children, all born within eight years of each other, Anna Freud struggled to get attention when growing up, and she was especially jealous of her sister, Sophie, two years older than her and always considered the ‘beauty’ in the family. In later years, Anna Freud spoke with feeling about the childhood experience of ‘being left out by the big ones, of being only a bore to them, and of feeling bored and left alone’ (quoted by Young-Bruehl, 1988/2008: 37). Within a year of her birth, her aunt, Minna Bernays, came to live in their spacious home at 19 Berggasse in Vienna, becoming, in a certain sense, a second mother to Anna and her siblings; but in her memories of her early childhood, it was her nurse, Josefine, who was remembered with the greatest warmth and affection.

From her childhood, Anna felt closer to her father – who took delight in his ‘naughty’ little girl – than to her mother. Although a good student at school, Anna’s passion as a child was in making up stories, which in adolescence turned into a tendency to daydream as she created elaborate worlds inspired by her favourite authors, such as Karl May and Rudyard Kipling. (The analysis of the ‘nice stories’, which she elaborated endlessly, was later to become the material for her first publication, ‘Beating Fantasies and Daydreams’ [1922]). At the age of 15 she completed her schooling, leaving her with a lifelong consciousness that she lacked the classical education provided to her brothers. But she never lost her voracious interest in learning – including the learning of languages, for which she showed a particular talent.

Although she had a number of suitors, Anna Freud never married, and she lived with both her parents until their deaths. Once he had been diagnosed with cancer in 1923, Sigmund Freud famously described Anna as his ‘Antigone’ – the child who, in Sophocles’ telling of the tale, led the blinded Oedipus out of Thebes and accompanied him until his death at Colonus. Anna Freud has been justly described as ‘her father’s daughter’ (Dyer, 1983), but this does not mean that she did not have her own life. She had a series of important friendships with mother-like figures, starting with Lou Andreas-Salomé, who acted as both a mentor and friend throughout Anna Freud’s young adulthood. In the mid-1920s Anna Freud began a lifelong friendship with Dorothy Burlingham, a wealthy American who had come to Vienna with her four children to escape a difficult marriage and to seek therapeutic help for her children. Dorothy became Anna’s companion – escaping with her to London in 1938 when Freud and his family were forced to flee Vienna, and working alongside her until Dorothy’s death in 1979. Anna Freud became almost a surrogate mother to Dorothy’s children, and Dorothy and Anna shared a number of holiday homes, where they would swim, take long walks and ride horses when the opportunity arose.

Although Anna Freud did not write a memoir of her early life, it is now widely accepted that the case vignette of ‘the young governess’ in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936) is a disguised self-portrait. As a child, the governess had been very demanding:

She wished to have and to do everything that her much older playmates had and did – indeed, she wanted to do everything better than they and to be admired for her cleverness. Her everlasting cry of ‘Me too!’ was a nuisance to her elders.

(1936: 134)

As a young adult, however, what struck those who met the young governess was ‘her unassuming character and the modesty of the demands which she made on life’ (p. 134). She was unmarried and childless, dressed somewhat shabbily, and avoided competition with others whenever possible. Although careless of herself, the governess took an interest in the love life of her women friends and colleagues, to whom she often acted as a confidante and matchmaker; she also ‘displayed a lively interest in her friends’ clothes … [and] was devoted to other people’s children, as was indicated by her choice of profession’ (p. 135). The case vignette shows how the governess is in certain respects ‘too good’, dealing with her own jealousy and envy by displacing those feelings onto others and appearing to surrender her own needs. But rather than repression, Anna Freud shows how the governess actually ‘gratified her instincts by sharing in the gratification of others’, using the mechanisms of projection and identification (p. 137). She describes this particular combination and use of defence mechanisms as a form of ‘altruistic surrender’, used to overcome the remnants of the young child’s ‘narcissistic mortification’:

It was only after analysis [that] she found that she ardently desired to live long enough to furnish her new home and to pass an examination which would secure her promotion in her profession. Her home and the examination signified, though in a sublimated form, the fulfilment of instinctual wishes which analysis had enabled her to relate once more to her own life.

(p. 146)

If the governess is a self-portrait, then Anna Freud’s capacity to analyse her own characteristic defences also helped her to modify them, so that as she grew older she was able to enjoy attention, even if she remained an intensely private person. Those who trained under her, or worked alongside her at the Hampstead Clinic in the 1960s and 1970s, remember Anna Freud as an impressive and inspiring figure, but one who was somewhat shy and awkward in more informal, social situations. (The exception to this was when she was speaking to children, where many remark on her extraordinary capacity to engage them and make them at ease with her.) But despite her apparent formality, Anna Freud had a great passion for life itself, and she always enjoyed the challenge of taking on new tasks and solving new problems; of meeting new people and finding ways to communicate with those whom she encountered. Indeed, she worked tirelessly; retirement was an option she never seriously considered.

Anna Freud’s commitment to her work, however, did not stop her from maintaining other interests. She loved being by the water, and was over eighty when she swam in the sea for the last time (Yorke, 1983b); she kept several much-loved dogs in her home, owned and rode a horse, and enjoyed going walking in the mountains and in the Irish countryside where she and Dorothy Burlingham owned a cottage. She had a passion for knitting, crocheting and weaving (she kept a loom in her home in London, and many of the rugs and cushions in her house were home-made); she read crime-fiction and detective stories at an incredible rate; and she took great delight in the music of Mahler, Brahms and Mozart, among others (Valenstein, 1983).

Among those who knew her directly, friends and colleagues most often commented on her phenomenal memory and clarity of thought; the delight she took in speaking and listening to children; her dedication to work and to psychoanalysis; her stoicism and courage in the face of adversity; and her liveliness and curiosity about the world. They also focus on her wit and humour, which does not often appear in her professional writing but might be seen as a remnant of her childish ‘naughtiness’.

Between two cities: Vienna and London

Anna Freud’s life can be divided into two periods. For the first 43 years of her life she lived and worked in Vienna, and this time and place has been aptly described as the ‘cradle of her creativity’ (Yorke, 1983c: 15). In 1938, following Hitler’s entry into Austria (the Anschluss), she escaped to England with her elderly father, who died in London the following year. Anna Freud lived in London for the following 45 years, until her death in 1982. One life in Vienna, and another in London:

Between the two phases came the Anschluss; and it was the dislocation in terms of geography and circumstance that formed the dividing line. The work itself, in spite of the tragic upheaval, was a continuum.

(Yorke, 1983c: 15)

Whenever Anna Freud spoke about her life in Vienna, especially of the years following the First World War, when she was part of the newly expanding psychoanalytic movement, she conveyed her sense of the excitement of being part of something momentous. She came of age at an exciting moment in both European and psychoanalytic history. After qualifying as a psychoanalyst in 1922, she found herself living in an Austrian society – ‘Red Vienna’ – emerging from the horrors of the war, but brimming with ideas about the creation of a better society. Looking back on her life, Anna Freud was later to write:

Back then in Vienna we were all so excited – full of energy: it was as if a whole new continent was being explored, and we were the explorers, and we now had a chance to change things.

(quoted by Midgley, 2007: 939)

From the mid-1920s, the young people around Anna Freud – a mixture of dreamers, radicals and utopians – gathered together to form a ‘Kinderseminar’ (children’s seminar; Cohler, 2008) – named not simply because they were exploring the new field of child analysis, but also because they were considered to be in their ‘analytic infancy’ by the more senior analysts in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (A. Freud, 1967a[1964]: 513). It was here that the first ideas about the technique of child analysis emerged, while Melanie Klein, in Berlin, was developing equally significant – but radically different – ideas about the psychoanalytic treatment of children (see Chapter 2, this volume). The excitement of opening a whole new field for psychoanalysis was palpable. A member of the ‘Kinderseminar’ working with Anna Freud at the time, Anna Maenchen, recalled many years later how someone once complained that the seminar discussions of members’ clinical work often continued until 2 a.m. – Anna Freud had simply smiled, and said: ‘Sleep? What is it?’ (Maenchen, 1983: 61).

Looking back on her early career in Vienna at a conference organised by the Yale Child Study Center in 1966, Anna Freud summed up the key elements that had shaped her professional life. She wrote:

I have been especially fortunate all my life. From the very beginning, I was able to move back and forth between practice and theory. I started out as an elementary school teacher. I changed from that to the field of analysis and child analysis. From then on, I moved constantly back and forth, from the theoretical study of these problems to their practical application.

(1967b[1964]: 225)

For her theoretical education, Anna Freud had been listening to the discussions of her father and his colleagues at their ‘Wednesday meetings’ for some time before she began to read his work as an adolescent. The early 1920s was an exciting period for psychoanalysis, with Freud’s own papers, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920a), The Ego and the Id (1923) and Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926[1925]) bringing in a whole new perspective on the mind (the ‘structural theory’ and the concept of the death drive, as well as new ideas about the role of the ego), while at the same time Freud’s colleagues both challenged and developed his ideas in works such as The Psychology of the Unconscious (Jung, 1912), The Development of Psychoanalysis (Ferenczi and Rank, 1923) or The Trauma of Birth (Rank, 1924). Anna Freud learnt about all of these developments at first hand, through both private discussions and public seminars. She also experienced two periods of analysis with her father, first in 1918 and then again in 1924 – the influence of which has been hotly debated by later commentators. (For a balanced view, see Young-Bruehl, 1988/2008, chap. 3.) Like many of her generation, Anna Freud’s education as a ‘lay analyst’ (i.e. one who does not have a medical qualification) did not follow a set programme, as she later explained:

[O]ur training took place at a period before the official psychoanalytic training institutes came into being. We were trained by our personal analysts, by extensive reading, by our own, unsupervised efforts with our first patients, and by lively interchange of ideas and discussion of problems with our elders and contemporaries.

(1967a[1964]: 511)

Alongside this theoretical education, Anna Freud’s practical experience in the 1920s and 1930s came first from teaching school for five years and then by gaining a range of clinical experience with both adult and child patients. At the same time, she worked alongside Siegfried Bernfeld at his Baumgarten ‘camp school’ for children made homeless by the First World War, and in 1926 she set up her own experiment in education, the ‘Matchbox’ School (also referred to in the literature as the Hietzing School or the Burlingham/ Rosenfeld School) (Midgley, 2008a). She also began giving lectures on child analysis as part of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training course and, in a series of talks commissioned by the Board of Education of the City of Vienna, began to explore the application of psychoanalytic ideas to the wider community of childcare professionals, especially teachers (see Chapter 3). Regular seminars for nursery school workers followed, and to these ventures was added, in 1937, an experimental nursery for toddlers from some of the poorest parts of the city – the Jackson Nursery. With colleagues, including August Aichhorn and Willi Hoffer, Anna Freud also established a Course for Educators at the Vienna Training Institute:

Here, teachers from nursery schools, elementary schools, and high schools were introduced in careful, consistent, and painstaking manner to the principles of psychoanalytic child psychology and to their relevance for the understanding, upbringing, and teaching of children of all ages. T...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Anna Freud: A Chronology
• 1 Introduction: Anna Freud, her life and work
• 2 Psychoanalysis with children
• 3 The application of psychoanalytic ideas to education
• 4 The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence
• 5 The Hampstead War Nurseries
• 6 Psychoanalytic research and the observation of children
• 7 The psychoanalytic treatment of adults
• 8 The assessment and diagnosis of childhood disturbances
• 9 Developmental psychopathology
• 10 Child analysis and developmental therapy
• 11 Psychoanalysis and paediatrics: The care of children in hospital
• 12 Children and family law
• 13 Conclusion: The legacy of Anna Freud
• Bibliography
• Index