www.psychspace.com心理学空间网About Anna Freud (1896-1982)
About Anna Freud (1896-1982)
Born on 3 December 1895, Anna Freud was the youngest of Sigmund and Martha Freud's six children.
She was a lively child with a reputation for mischief. Her father, Sigmund, wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in 1899: "Anna has become downright beautiful through naughtiness..."
She grew up somewhat in the shadow of her sister, Sophie, who was two and a half years older than her. When her rival married in 1913, Anna wrote to her father. "I am glad that Sophie is getting married, because the unending quarrel between us was horrible for me."
Anna finished her education at the Cottage Lyceum in Vienna in 1912, but had not yet decided upon a career.
In 1914, she traveled alone to England to improve her English. She was there when war was declared, and thus became an 'enemy alien' (25 years later, in 1939, this experience was to be repeated). She had to return to Vienna, with the Austro-Hungarian ambassador and his entourage, via Gibraltar and Genoa.
Later that year she began teaching at her old school, the Cottage Lyceum. One of her pupils later wrote: "This young lady had far more control over us than the older 'aunties.'"
Already in 1910, Anna had begun reading her father's work, but her serious involvement in psychoanalysis began in 1918, when her father started psychoanalysing her. (It was not anomalous for a father to analyse his own daughter at this time, before any orthodoxy had been established).
In 1920 they both attended the International Psychoanalytical Congress at The Hague. They now had both work and friends in common. One common friend was the writer and psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé, who was once the confidante of Friedrich Nietzsche and Rainer Maria Rilke, and who was to become Anna Freud's confidante in the 1920s.
Through Anna, the Freuds also met Rilke, whose poetry Anna Freud greatly admired. Her volume of his Buch der Bilder bears his dedication, commemorating their first meeting. Anna's literary interests paved the way for her future career. "The more I became interested in psychoanalysis," she wrote, "the more I saw it as a road to the same kind of broad and deep understanding of human nature that writers possess."