Anna Freud

She died on October 9, 1982 in London, England, at the age of 86.

She was born on December 3, 1895 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, to Sigmund Freud, a neurologist now known as the ‘father of psychoanalysis’, and his wife, Martha Bernays.She had five elder siblings: Mathilde, Jean Martin, Oliver, Ernst and Sophie.

From an early age, she had a strained relationship with her mother and also remained distant from her five siblings. She had major difficulty in getting along with her sister Sophie, who was very attractive and with whom she rivaled for her father’s attention.

She also suffered from depression which caused chronic eating disorders and was repeatedly sent to health farms for thorough rest. Despite her misfits, she developed a close relationship with her father who was very fond of her.

She received most of her education from her father despite attending schools. In 1912, after completing her education from the Cottage Lyceum in Vienna, she traveled to Italy to stay with her grandmother. From there she went alone to England in 1914 but was soon forced to return to her homeland when the World War I broke out.

In 1914, upon her return to Vienna, she began teaching at the Cottage Lyceum, her old school. From 1915 to 1917, she served there as a trainee, and then as a teacher from 1917 to 1920.

In 1918, she became actively involved in her father’s psychoanalysis study in which she was the subject of his research. In 1922, she was able to present the results of this analysis to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in a paper titled ‘The Relation of Beating Fantasies to a Daydream’.

Later she became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and began working with children in private practice. Within two years, she was offered a teaching position at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute.

From 1927 to 1934, she served as the General Secretary of the ‘International Psychoanalytical Association’. In 1935, she became the director of the ‘Vienna Psychoanalytical Training Institute’. Later, she published her book ‘The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense’, a study that laid the groundwork for the field of ego psychology.

During this time she also founded the Hietzing School, along with Dorothy Burlingham and Eva Rosenfeld. The school was an attempt to create a more holistic educational curriculum informed by psychoanalytic principles.

She created the field of child psychoanalysis and her work contributed greatly to the understanding of child psychology. She noted that children’s symptoms differed from those of adults and were often related to developmental stages.

One of her most significant published works is ‘The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense’ in which she outlined and expanded upon her father's theory of psychological defense mechanisms.