Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Anna Freud




Personal life

Anna Freud (Vienna, December 3, 1895 - London, October 9, 1982), Austrian psychoanalyst. Sigmund Freud´s daughter, made ​​their own contributions to psychoanalysis, particularly on child psychology.
Anna was born in Vienna on December 3, 1895. It was the sixth and last child of the marriage of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. His birth did her mother be physically and mentally exhausted, and Anna started to be under the care of the governess Cihlarz Josefine, with whom he had a special relationship, referred by Anna as "the oldest relationship and most genuine of my childhood", and wich later inspired his concepts of "psychological mother" and the contents of the article "Losing and be lost".
She had a distant relationship with his mother and feelings of great ambivalence with his sister Sophie, the favorite of her mother and most beautiful of the daughters, but Anna tried to compensate it with their intellectual development.

Institutional Background

In 1912 Anna finished secondary education at the Lyceum, and was sent to rest to Merano because of her weight loss, due to the wedding of Sophie, her sister. He spent periods of extreme fatigue and she referred to it as "it" that made her tired and "feel stupid".
In 1920 was a guest at the first postwar international conference in The Hague. Two years later he entered the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society as a child psychoanalyst. In 1921 he met Lou Andreas SalomĂ©, Russian-born psychoanalyst who took the place of "good mother" and "mother analyst", finding in it a feminine and maternal and valuable assistance in the preparation of her work on the fantasies of flogging. In the decade of 1920´s Anna knows Dorothy Burlingham, a rich American who had just separated from her husband, who was mentally ill. Anna and Dorothy founded together a Hampstead War Nurseries. It is said that Anna and Dorothy had a relationship but she has never confirmed.
1925 is named secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. There promoted the Kinderseminar formation, a seminar for research on pedagogy and aimed not only psychoanalysts but also educators and social workers.
Collaborated in the "Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalitische Pedagogie", directed by W.Hoffer, and in 1927 held the position of secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). In 1934 Anna began to write “The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence”
In 1938 Anna and her family decided to depart from Viena because of the invasion of Hitler. Once in London, Anna organized some residences for children, like the Hampstead clinic. Anna was a member of the Executive Council of the IPA in the 1950s. Since 1976, Anna has delegated the management of the clinic.
She was a teacher at Yale Law School, and in 1975 she became ill. During this time she devoted herself to the refutation of post-Freudian theorists. Also received honorary doctorates conferred her by the Universities of Vienna, Columbia, Harvard and Frankfort.
Anna died while she was sleeping during the night of October 9, 1982

Contributions:

Anna Freud is one of the forbidden women in the history of psychology. She was the founder of Child Psychoanalysis and she had enormous contributions to the Psychoanalysis. Actually she was not famous for study the women or gender roles acquisition, but it is necessary to include her in the story of psychology of women.

References:

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