Anna Freud

Anna Freud (1895–1982) was the youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud and the principal architect of what became known as ego psychology. Analyzed by her own father — an arrangement that attracted lasting controversy — she built her career in Vienna as a pioneer of child psychoanalysis, developing an approach that emphasized the child’s real environment, the role of parents, and the developmental timing of analytic interventions. Her clash with Melanie Klein over the proper technique and theory of child analysis was one of the defining disputes of twentieth-century psychoanalysis. She followed her father to London in 1938 when the Nazi Anschluss ended Jewish life in Vienna, founded and ran the Hampstead War Nurseries during the Second World War, and spent the rest of her long career building the Hampstead Clinic into an international center for child psychoanalysis. Her 1936 book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence gave ego psychology its theoretical charter. Alongside Ernest Jones, Ernst Kris, and Kurt Eissler, she became one of the principal custodians and interpreters of her father’s legacy — a role that shaped both what was preserved and what was suppressed in the postwar transmission of Freudian thought.

Formation and Analysis by Her Father

Anna Freud was analyzed by Sigmund Freud himself — a fact that her contemporaries registered with varying degrees of concern. Ernest Jones wrote to Sigmund Freud saying he could not agree with Anna’s published work on child analysis, surmising that its positions reflected her own “imperfectly analyzed resistances,” a neurotic dimension to her personality that, Jones cryptically added, he could prove “in detail.”(Makari, George, 2008) Jones’s imputation — that Anna’s technical positions were expressions of incomplete personal analysis — relied on a logic the movement had applied to earlier dissenters: theoretical disagreement as symptom. That the implied analyst was her own father gave the critique a peculiar edge that Jones did not make explicit.

The early history of child psychoanalysis before Anna Freud’s intervention was marked by a cautionary tragedy. Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, the first practitioner to argue that children should be treated at home rather than on a couch and that they should play in sessions, was murdered by her nephew Rudolph Hug in 1924; he claimed her constant analysis made him homicidal, and most critics now believe she had invented a firsthand account of childhood development to support Freud’s theories (Makari, George, 2008).

Her formal entry into child psychoanalysis came through lecturing at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute from 1926, where she began teaching what she understood as the emerging technique for work with children. Her 1927 book Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis — a condensed version of those lectures — became the immediate occasion for the first major assault on her work from the London Kleinian group.

The Klein Dispute: Four Technical Disagreements

The dispute between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein that would define both of their careers was not a single confrontation but a series of escalating exchanges across more than two decades, beginning with a coordinated London attack in 1927 and culminating in the wartime Controversial Discussions.

At a May 1927 symposium convened by the British Psychoanalytical Society, Klein delivered a thirty-two-page attack on Anna Freud’s book. After Klein, Joan Riviere, Nina Searl, Ella Sharpe, Edward Glover, and Ernest Jones all added critiques. Three months later, the International Journal of Psychoanalysis — edited by Jones — published over fifty pages of these attacks.(Makari, George, 2008) Anna Freud was being tried in absentia by the British Society’s senior membership, with Jones as judge and publisher simultaneously.

The substantive disagreements Makari’s analysis identifies can be organized around four axes. First: whether child analysis should preserve the child’s existing relationship with its parents, as Anna Freud insisted, or proceed to analyze the Oedipal complex directly, as Klein demanded. Klein read Anna’s position as a refusal of the deepest analytic work. Second: whether a transference neurosis could be achieved in young children. Anna maintained it could not; Klein insisted it could and that a child’s play constituted transference phenomena just as adult free association did.(Makari, George, 2008) Third: whether pedagogy had any place in analytic work with children. Anna argued for an initial educational period to win the child’s trust and affection; Klein argued this substituted manipulation for analysis and foreclosed negative transference. Fourth: Anna’s advice to work hard to win the child’s affection was, in Klein’s reading, precisely the kind of therapeutic maneuver that made the child compliant and avoided the hostile, aggressive material that was therapeutically most important.

Running beneath these technical disputes was a deeper theoretical disagreement about the origin of the child’s suffering.(Makari, George, 2008) Anna Freud, like Hermine Hug-Hellmuth and many left-leaning Viennese child analysts, attributed children’s suffering to environmental deprivations.(Makari, George, 2008) Klein, in contrast, argued that children’s troubles were their own psychic making.(Makari, George, 2008)

This was a contest over the nature-nurture axis with direct political implications. Anna Freud’s attention to real environmental deprivation placed her in sympathy with social reform; Klein’s indifference to the environment aligned her theoretically with a conservative reading of human suffering as innately determined. The alignment was not absolute — Anna Freud never became a political reformer in the manner of Wilhelm Reich — but the divergence in theoretical emphasis carried real weight in the political climate of the 1930s.

The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936)

Anna Freud’s 1936 book was a direct response to the theoretical impasse that Klein’s challenges and Reich’s character analysis had created for Viennese practice. It proposed a reorientation of psychoanalysis around the empirically observable ego — the “I” — as its primary object of study, in contrast to both Klein’s deep object-world and the id-centered drive theory of classical orthodoxy.

The book’s central proposal was “equidistance.” Makari’s account captures the strategic intelligence of the formulation: the analyst should take a stand equidistant from the id (“It”), the ego (“I”), and the superego (“Over-I”), neither biased toward drive interpretation in the Freudian manner, nor biased toward superego and object-world interpretation in the Kleinian manner.(Makari, George, 2008) This was Anna Freud’s solution to the debates between sex and death, between depth analysis and resistance analysis, and between fantastic internal dangers and real external threats. It was, in effect, a pluralism: all three psychic domains mattered; the analyst should engage with whichever was most accessible in any given moment.

By 1936, Makari’s analysis shows, psychoanalysis had crystallized into two rival perspectives. The English school, led by Klein with the support of Jones, Riviere, Isaacs, and Strachey, organized around object relations — how projection and introjection populated the inner world with fantastically charged others. The Viennese school, loosely organized around Anna Freud, worked within the new “I” psychology — structural conflict, ego defenses, the empirically observable workings of the self.(Makari, George, 2008) The 1936 book gave the Viennese position a concise theoretical statement at the moment when the Berlin Institute’s destruction by the Nazis was scattering its trained analysts across Europe and America, several of whom were arriving in London.

Outside the movement, Robert Wälder’s 1930 “Principle of Multiple Function” had provided theoretical support for this pluralistic stance, proposing that each psychic act attempted to solve problems from all four domains simultaneously — drives, external world, superego, and repetition compulsion.(Makari, George, 2008) This principle was consistent with Anna Freud’s equidistance, and the Viennese circle around Anna Freud — including Wälder, Heinz Hartmann, and Ernst Kris — formed the intellectual core of what would become the dominant school of American psychoanalysis after 1945.

Vienna Work: Building a Child Analytic Community

Between the 1927 London attack and her departure from Vienna in 1938, Anna Freud was less productive as a theorist than as an institution-builder. After being savaged at the London symposium, she published relatively little while Klein published paper after paper. Instead, she built a Vienna community of child analysts that had no equivalent elsewhere.

In 1927, the year of the symposium, she founded an experimental school with Dorothy Burlingham and Eva Rosenfeld that attracted practitioners interested in psychoanalytic pedagogy, including Peter Blos and a young artist named Erik Homburger Erikson.(Makari, George, 2008) In 1929, she started a technical seminar specifically for child analysts in Vienna. She edited a special issue of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly on child analysis. Around her gathered the group of analysts — Editha Sterba, Willi Hoffer, Jenny Wälder, Berta Bornstein, Marianne Kris — who would carry Viennese child analytic practice into exile and eventually into American training programs.

This community-building work is less visible in Makari’s account than Klein’s theoretical innovations of the same years, but it represents the institutional infrastructure through which Anna Freud’s approach was transmitted. When the Viennese arrived in London in 1938, they arrived not as isolated individuals but as a functioning professional community with established training practices, shared clinical assumptions, and personal ties to one another.

Expulsion of Reich and the Question of Political Alignment

Anna Freud’s most direct exercise of organizational power before the emigration came in the campaign to expel Wilhelm Reich from the IPA. At the 1934 Lucerne Congress, she wrote to Ernest Jones — then IPA president — asking that Reich be expelled. As Makari’s account records her reasoning: as a Marxist radical in their ranks, Reich posed too much of a risk. Besides, she wrote, her father found it “offensive” that Reich “has forced psychoanalysis to become political.”(Makari, George, 2008)

The expulsion had multiple rationales. Theoretically, Reich’s rejection of the death drive and his insistence that masochism had no biological source were serious departures from current orthodoxy. Politically, his founding of sex-political clinics in Vienna and his Communist Party membership made him a liability at a moment when the movement was trying to survive in an environment of rising fascism. But the logic Anna Freud invoked — that psychoanalysis should not be political — was itself a political position: the decision to withdraw from political engagement in the face of fascism was a form of accommodation that her father and Jones had also adopted in their handling of the Berlin Institute’s Aryanization.

In the aftermath of the 1934 expulsion, the political landscape within the movement shifted. Otto Fenichel, the most systematically theoretical of the left-leaning analysts, moved to align himself more closely with the Viennese as a united front against what he regarded as Klein’s reactionary theories — even though most Viennese were bourgeois liberals rather than radicals.(Makari, George, 2008) Fenichel’s 1938 book Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique drew explicitly on Anna Freud’s equidistance concept to synthesize the competing positions, and in doing so made her framework available to a generation of American analysts as their primary clinical reference.(Makari, George, 2008)

The tension between this stance and Anna Freud’s commitment to child welfare through war nurseries and environmental attention runs through her career without obvious resolution. She was capable of sustained practical engagement with social conditions of suffering while simultaneously arguing that psychoanalysis itself should remain politically neutral. Reich’s mistake, in this reading, was not his attention to the social determinants of mental distress but his insistence that psychoanalysis as such was a political weapon — a position that was impossible to hold without endangering the movement.

London and the War Nurseries

The Nazi Anschluss of March 11, 1938, ended organized psychoanalysis in Vienna overnight.(Makari, George, 2008) Sigmund Freud departed on June 4, 1938, for London via Paris, rescued in part through the intervention of Princess Marie Bonaparte, Ernest Jones, and William Bullitt.(Makari, George, 2008) The journey took him first to Paris and then to London. The mass exodus sent most of the Viennese analysts to New York; a smaller group followed to London, where Anna Freud arrived with Willi Hoffer, Robert Wälder, Eduard Bibring, Ernst Kris, and others from the Vienna circle — by 1940 the entire European psychoanalytic community had effectively been wiped out.(Makari, George, 2008)

The mass arrival of Viennese analysts in London created immediate institutional tension.(Makari, George, 2008) The British Psychoanalytical Society, dominated by Klein and her circle, was understandably unsettled by the sudden appearance of a substantial Viennese minority in their membership.(Makari, George, 2008) When the London Blitz began, Kleinians fled to the countryside while the Viennese, as alien immigrants restricted in their movement, continued attending British Society meetings where at times they formed a majority.(Makari, George, 2008)

The weeks before the war nurseries opened were marked by private grief: on September 23, 1939, Max Schur administered a lethal dose of morphine to Sigmund Freud at his request — and Freud had not forgotten to ask Schur to consult with Anna beforehand.(Makari, George, 2008)

Between 1940 and 1945, she ran the Hampstead War Nurseries with Dorothy Burlingham, residential institutions for children separated from their parents by the war. The nurseries were a sustained practical experiment in the developmental consequences of early separation and institutional care. Daily observation of children’s responses to bombing, evacuation, and loss of parents generated a body of clinical material that informed her subsequent developmental thinking and contributed to the broader postwar literature on attachment, separation, and loss in which Bowlby’s work became the most theoretically developed strand.

The Controversial Discussions

The institutional crisis within the British Psychoanalytical Society came to a head in the wartime “Controversial Discussions” — a series of scientific meetings held between January 1943 and May 1944 that attempted to adjudicate the theoretical disagreements between the Kleinian and Viennese camps.(Makari, George, 2008)

The discussions did not resolve the theoretical dispute. What they produced instead was a political compromise: separate Kleinian and Anna Freudian training tracks, with a requirement that each candidate’s second supervisor come from a third, independent “middle group” unaligned with either school. Makari’s account is precise about the function of this arrangement: it “re-created the lost landscape of European psychoanalysis,” providing institutional space for theorists — Bowlby, Winnicott, Balint, Bion, Heimann — who did not fit the categories of either major camp.(Makari, George, 2008)

The discussions also clarified the terms of the organizational dispute. When Walter Schmideberg moved to have the British Society affirm its commitment to “Freudian psychoanalysis” — which would have excluded Kleinian innovations — Susan Isaacs and Joan Riviere reframed the society’s purpose as furthering “the science of psychoanalysis, founded by Freud.” The formulation — “founded by” rather than “identical with” — preserved Kleinian room for maneuver.(Makari, George, 2008) Anna Freud lost this terminological battle. The British Society would not define itself by reference to Freud’s specific positions; it would honor the founder while remaining open to theoretical development beyond him.

Postwar Legacy: Custodian and Constructor

After 1945, Anna Freud’s role in organized psychoanalysis shifted increasingly toward that of keeper of the Freudian inheritance. Makari’s account of postwar Freudian mythology identifies her, alongside Ernst Kris, Kurt Eissler, and Ernest Jones, as propagating a “legend of Freud as a solitary genius, who created psychoanalysis in splendid isolation, unaided by contemporaries and attacked by prigs and rebellious followers who often suffered from grave mental illness.”(Makari, George, 2008) This was a historical narrative that served the orthodox position against heterodox challengers, and it shaped the transmission of psychoanalytic history for a generation.

The theoretical framework that carried the Viennese approach into American dominance was largely Hartmann’s. His 1939 Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation had proposed a “conflict-free sphere” of the ego — a restricted domain where reason and free will could operate without being entirely determined by drive or by external compulsion — a position that steered between Klein’s drive-determinism and Reich’s social determinism.(Makari, George, 2008) In the United States, Hartmann’s adaptation theory aligned well with American values of self-reliance.(Makari, George, 2008) His hope to link psychoanalysis to academic psychology was taken up by David Rapaport.(Makari, George, 2008) A coalition of ego psychologists and orthodox Freudians controlled the American Psychoanalytic Association, which transformed from a loose federation into a centralized body policing training standards nationwide.(Makari, George, 2008)

The Hampstead Clinic, which she had founded after the war, became a distinctive center: empirically oriented, developmental in focus, committed to long-term careful child observation as a method for testing psychoanalytic hypotheses. The “developmental lines” concept she developed in Normality and Pathology in Childhood (1965) — a framework for tracing the course of development from infantile dependence to adult functioning across multiple domains simultaneously — was her major theoretical contribution of the postwar period. It was far less sweeping than Klein’s object relations theory but more closely grounded in the observable realities of child development.

Scull’s account of postwar American psychoanalysis notes the émigré analysts’ characteristic contempt for their American colleagues, whom they “regarded as their intellectual and cultural inferiors.”(Andrew Scull, 2015) Anna Freud was not exempt from this attitude. Her relationship with American ego psychology was an alliance of mutual necessity: Americans provided the institutional resources and the patient population; the Viennese provided theoretical credibility and historical legitimacy. The resulting American psychoanalysis was, as Scull notes, a substantially diluted version of its European precursor — more optimistic, more adapted to therapeutic practicality, less inflected by the tragic register that ran through Freud’s later work. Scull’s account of the subsequent biological turn in psychiatry notes that the schools she had helped to define — ego psychology, child psychoanalysis, the developmental approach centered at Hampstead — were among those progressively displaced by pharmacotherapy and the DSM system in the decades after her death.(Andrew Scull, 2015)

Anna Freud lived until 1982, nearly forty years after her father’s death. She outlasted most of the movement’s founding generation and the generation that followed it, remaining active as a writer and clinical supervisor into her final decade. Her archive at the Freud Museum in London and the Hampstead Index she created for systematizing clinical observation at the clinic remained influential long after the theoretical battles of the 1940s and 1950s had been superseded. She never made peace with the Kleinians, and the British Society’s three-track compromise remained the permanent institutional expression of an argument that theoretical resolution never settled.

See Also

• Sigmund Freud
• Sándor Ferenczi
• Melanie Klein
• Heinz Hartmann
• Dorothy Burlingham
• Erik Erikson
• Hampstead War Nurseries
• Controversial Discussions
• Ego Psychology
• Child Psychoanalysis

(Makari, George, 2008): makari-revolutioninmind-2008 ch62 “Hug-Hellmuth cast herself as an objective observer…”

Sources

All claims cite evidence cards from:

• Makari, G. (2008). Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis. New York: Harper. [Source ID: makari-revolutioninmind-2008]
• Scull, A. (2015). Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Source ID: scull-madnesscivilization-2015]