Anna Freud: Encyclopedia - Anna Freud

Anna Freud

Anna Freud (December 3, 1895, Vienna, Austria - October 9, 1982, London, England), the daughter of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and his wife Martha Bernays (1861-1951), was an Austrian-born British psychoanalyst, and pioneer of child psychoanalysis.

She was born in Vienna, Austria, and educated at Cottage Lyceum there. In 1914 she traveled to England, then returned to teach at the Cottage Lyceum. She entered psychoanalysis with her father in 1918, published her first paper on psychoanalysis in 1922, and entered practice as a psychoanalyst in 1923. She tended her father during his cancer (which was diagnosed in 1923), and took over many of his functions as he became less able to discharge them. She became General Secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association and director of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Training Institute. The Freuds fled Austria for England following the Nazi Anschluss: Sigmund Freud died in 1939. Anna Freud became more and more involved in child psychology, and her theoretical differences with Melanie Klein caused much controversy within the British Psychoanalytical Society. She founded several orphanages and studied the effects of war on children. After her death, her house at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, which was Sigmund Freud's last residence as well, was converted into a museum; it also features an Anna Freud room.

As the daughter of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and a child psychoanalyst herself, Anna did many studies on Infantile Feeding Disturbances. The three disturbances she mentions in the book "Food and Culture" are of organic origin, the instinctive process and neurotic disturbances. The organic disturbances Anna discusses are that of a mother and/or a doctor. As a mother, one is supposed to make eating enjoyable for a child. Restricting a child from eating when they are hungry is one way their appetite can be disturbed in the future. As an instinctive process, eating can be disturbed by simply giving the child something they don't want. For example, giving a child a hot food when they want a cold food could make the child uncomfortable and frustrated. The neurotic disturbances brought up in consist of oral and anal fixations. She states that when a child goes through the phase of playing with their food, they are thinking and comparing it to their own feces. Food and Culture: A Reader ed. Counihan, Carole; Van Esterik, Penny. Routledge, 1997. "The Psychoanalytic Study of Infantile Feeding Disturbances" by Anna Freud

See also

• The Century Of The Self

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