Anna Freud - Major Contributions To Psychoanalysis

Major Contributions To Psychoanalysis

Anna Freud's first article, 'on beating fantasies, drew in part on her own inner life, but th...made her contribution no less scientific'. In it she explained how 'Daydreaming, which consciously may be designed to suppress masturbation, is mainly unconsciously an elaboration of the original masturbatory fantasies'. Freud had earlier covered very similar ground in '"A Child is Being Beaten"' - 'they both used material from her analysis as clinical illustration in their sometimes complementary papers' - in which he highlighted a female case where 'an elaborate superstructure of day-dreams, which was of great significance for the life of the person concerned, had grown up over the masochistic beating-phantasy... which almost rose to the level of a work of art'.

'Her views on child development, which she expounded in 1927 in her first book, An Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis, clashed with those of Melanie Klein... was departing from the developmental schedule that Freud, and his analyst daughter, found most plausible'. In particular, Anna Freud's belief that 'In children's analysis, the transference plays a different role... and the analyst not only "represents mother" but is still an original second mother in the life of the child' became something of an orthodoxy over much of the psychoanalytic world.

For her next major work in 1936, her 'classic monograph on ego psychology and defense mechanisms, Anna Freud drew on her own clinical experience, but relied on her father's writings as the principal and authoritative source of her theoretical insights'. Here her 'cataloguing of regression, repression, reaction formation, isolation, undoing, projection, introjection, turning against the self, reversal and sublimation' helped establish the importance of the ego functions and the concept of defense mechanisms, continuing the greater emphasis on the ego of her father — 'We should like to learn more about the ego' — during his final decades.

Special attention was paid in it to later childhood and adolescent developments — 'I have always been more attracted to the latency period than the pre-Oedipal phases' - emphasising how the 'increased intellectual, scientific, and philosophical interests of this period represent attempts at mastering the drives'. The problem posed by physiological maturation has been stated forcefully by Anna Freud. "Aggressive impulses are intensified to the point of complete unruliness, hunger becomes voracity... The reaction-formations, which seemed to be firmly established in the structure of the ego, threaten to fall to pieces".

Selma Fraiberg's tribute of 1959 that 'The writings of Anna Freud on ego psychology and her studies in early child development have illuminated the world of childhood for workers in the most varied professions and have been for me my introduction and most valuable guide spoke at that time for most of psychoanalysis outside the Kleinian heartland.

Arguably, however, it was in Anna Freud's London years 'that she wrote her most distinguished psychoanalytic papers — including "About Losing and Being Lost", which everyone should read regardless of their interest in psychoanalysis'. Her description therein of 'simultaneous urges to remain loyal to the dead and to turn towards new ties with the living' may perhaps reflect her own mourning process after her father's recent death.

Focusing thereafter on research, observation and treatment of children, Anna Freud established a group of prominent child developmental analysts (which included Erik Erikson, Edith Jacobson and Margaret Mahler) who noticed that children's symptoms were ultimately analogue to personality disorders among adults and thus often related to developmental stages. Her book Normality and Pathology in Childhood (1965) summarised 'the use of developmental lines charting theoretical normal growth "from dependency to emotional self-reliance"'. Through these then revolutionary ideas Anna provided us with a comprehensive developmental theory and the concept of developmental lines, which combined her father's important drive model with more recent object relations theories emphasizing the importance of parents in child development processes.

Nevertheless her basic loyalty to her father's work remained unimpaired, and it might indeed be said that 'she devoted her life to protecting her father's legacy... In her theoretical work there would be little criticism of him, and she would make what is still the finest contribution to the psychoanalytic understanding of passivity', or what she termed 'altruistic surrender... excessive concern and anxiety for the lives of his love objects'. Jacques Lacan called 'Anna Freud the plumb line of psychoanalysis. Well, the plumb line doesn't make a building... it allows us to gauge the vertical of certain problems'; and by preserving so much of Freud's legacy and standards she may indeed have served as something of a living yardstick.

With psychoanalysis continuing to move away from classical Freudianism to other concerns, it may still be salutary to heed Anna Freud's warning about the potential loss of her father's 'emphasis on conflict within the individual person, the aims, ideas and ideals battling with the drives to keep the individual within a civilized community. It has become modern to water this down to every individual's longing for perfect unity with his mother... There is an enormous amount that gets lost this way'.