Anna Freud was born on December 3, 1895, in Vienna, Austria. She was the youngest of Sigmund Freud’s six kids and was particularly near her father. Regardless of her father being famend because the founding father of the sector of psychoanalysis, Freud’s contributions to the sector of psychological well being stand on their very own, quite than within the shadow of her father. She is taken into account the founder of kid psychoanalysis. It’s also a lot to her credit score that her father, Sigmund Freud’s, protection mechanisms (resembling repression, denial, and suppression) have grow to be a part of our on a regular basis language, as it’s his daughter Anna Freud who offered a transparent description of those in her influential 1936 guide, The Ego and the Mechanisms of the Protection.
It’s stated that Freud felt she realized little at college and did most of her studying from her father’s mates and associates. Certainly, her formal training didn’t transcend highschool. Freud labored as an elementary college instructor after highschool and labored translating her father’s writings. The mix of those elevated her personal curiosity in baby psychology and psychoanalysis, and she or he started a kids’s psychoanalysis observe in 1923. In 1927, she revealed, “Introduction to the Strategy of Youngster Psychoanalysis,” which was a major growth within the therapeutic therapy of youngsters. Freud acknowledged that kids’s psychological well being signs differed from these of adults, and she or he identified, importantly, that they usually have been associated to numerous phases of growth. She additionally acknowledged every baby as a person with their very own wants and believed that therapeutic alliances wanted to be established based on every baby. In adapting psychoanalysis for youngsters, Anna Freud acknowledged that mendacity on a sofa was not conducive to kids staying targeted throughout remedy. As a substitute, she inspired them to sit down on the ground and play or draw, which she felt helped them to be extra expressive, free, and truthful.
Freud’s dedication to kids and baby growth prolonged past the remedy room. She started volunteer work in 1919 on the Baumgarten Youngsters’s Residence which served Jewish kids who had been orphaned or made homeless due to World Struggle I. In 1937 she and a colleague based the Jackson Nursery, a nursery college for youngsters residing in poverty in Vienna. There, by means of investigative work, she found that kids who have been allowed to decide on their very own meals ate higher, gained wanted weight, and achieved dietary stability by themselves.
Her work in Vienna was reduce quick nonetheless by the Nazi invasion of Austria after which by Anna’s personal arrest and interrogation by the Nazis in 1938. In a position to persuade her interrogators that her work was “innocuous,” Freud, who was Jewish, was capable of acquire a visa to depart Vienna together with her well-known father and head to London, the place Sigmund died only a few weeks later. Freud continued together with her work with kids in London, establishing the Hampstead Struggle Nursery which offered foster take care of single father or mother households. Throughout this time, she performed analysis into kids’s trauma, which demonstrated that kids who remained in London and endured Nazi bombings fared higher emotionally than those that have been despatched away from their households to presumably safer environment.
Put up World Struggle II, Freud established the Hampstead Youngster Remedy Centre, which was granted charity standing. The Centre, devoted to baby evaluation and analysis, educated the primary era of kid psychotherapists to work within the fledgling Nationwide Well being Service in England. Renamed the Anna Freud Centre, the clinic exists right this moment, lately celebrating its seventieth 12 months as a charity. Freud additionally revealed, “Normality and Pathology in Childhood,” in 1965, which considerably contributed to the institution of the sector of developmental psychology. Freud continued her work at her clinic till she died in 1983. Her contributions proceed to affect the sector of psychology and significantly formed our understanding and strategy to the therapy of youngsters.
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