Anna Freud

(b. Dec. 3, 1895, Vienna--d. Oct. 9, 1982, London), Austrian-born British founder of child psychoanalysis and one of its foremost practitioners. She also made fundamental contributions to understanding how the ego, or consciousness, functions in averting painful ideas, impulses, and feelings. (see also Index: child psychiatry ) The youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud, Anna was devoted to her father and enjoyed an intimate association with developing psychoanalytic theory and practice. As a young woman she taught elementary school, and her daily observation of children drew her to child psychology. While serving as chairman of the Vienna Psycho-Analytic Society (1925-28), she published a paper (1927) outlining her approach to child psychoanalysis. Publication of Anna Freud's Das Ich und die Abwehrmechanismen (1936; The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense, 1937) gave a strong, new impetus to ego psychology. The principal human defense mechanism, she indicated, is repression, an unconscious process that develops as the young child learns that some impulses, if acted upon, could prove dangerous to himself. Other mechanisms she described include the projection of one's own feeling into another; directing aggressive impulses against the self (suicide being the extreme example); identification with an overpowering aggressor; and the divorce of ideas from feelings. The work also was a pioneer effort in the development of adolescent psychology. In 1938 Anna Freud and her father, whom she had cared for during a number of years of his terminal illness, escaped from Nazi-dominated Austria and settled in London, where she worked at a Hampstead nursery until 1945. During World War II she and a U.S. associate, Dorothy Burlingham, recounted their work in Young Children in Wartime (1942), Infants Without Families (1943), and War and Children (1943). Anna Freud founded the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic, London, in 1947 and served as its director from 1952 to 1982. She viewed play as the child's adaptation to reality but not necessarily as a revelation of unconscious conflicts. She worked closely with parents and believed that analysis should have an educational influence on the child. A summation of her thought is to be found in her Normality and Pathology in Childhood (1968).

Karen Horney

née DANIELSEN (b. Sept. 16, 1885, Hamburg, Ger.--d. Dec. 4, 1952, New York, N.Y., U.S.), German-born American psychoanalyst who departed from some of the basic principles of Sigmund Freud, suggesting that environmental and social conditions, rather than biological drives, determine much of individual personality and are the chief causes of neuroses and personality disorders. After receiving her M.D. from the University of Berlin (1912), she underwent psychoanalytic training with Karl Abraham, a friend and close associate of Freud. In about 1915 she began five years of outpatient and clinical work in Berlin hospitals, and from 1920 to 1932 she conducted a private practice and taught at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. She then went to the United States to become associate director of the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago, moving to New York City in 1934 to return to private practice and teach at the New School for Social Research. There she produced her major theoretical works, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937) and New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939), in which she disputed several major tenets of Freud's psychoanalytic theory, holding instead that neuroses were caused by disturbances in interpersonal relationships. In particular, Horney objected to Freud's concepts of the libido, a death instinct, and penis envy, which she felt could be more adequately explained by cultural and social conditions. She objected that the idea of penis envy treated female psychology as no more than an offshoot of male psychology and that it was inadequate to explain sex-based behavioral differences. Horney believed that a primary condition responsible for the later development of neurosis was the infant's experience of basic anxiety, in which the child felt "isolated and helpless in a potentially hostile world." The various strategies the child adopts to cope with this anxiety can eventually become persistent and irrational needs that cause both neurosis and personality disorder. Many of Horney's ideas, rooted as they were in her wide clinical experience, were translated into a new approach to psychoanalytic therapy. She sought to help patients identify the specific cause of current anxieties, feeling that it was just as important to the goals of psychoanalysis to deal with real-life, present-day problems as it was to reconstruct childhood emotional states and fantasies. In many cases, she suggested that the patient could even learn to psychoanalyze himself. Her refusal to adhere to strict Freudian theory caused Horney's expulsion from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1941, which left her free to organize a new group, the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. She continued to write, further expounding her views in Our Inner Conflicts (1945) and Neurosis and Human Growth (1950). Horney's analysis of the causes and dynamics of neurosis and her revision of Freud's theory of personality have remained influential.

Melanie Klein

née REIZES (b. March 30, 1882, Vienna--d. Sept. 22, 1960, London), Austrian-born British psychoanalyst known for her work with young children, in which observations of free play provided insights into the child's unconscious fantasy life, enabling her to psychoanalyze children as young as two or three years of age. The youngest child of a Viennese dental surgeon, Klein expressed an early interest in medicine but abandoned her plans when she married at 21. The marriage, though unhappy, produced three children. She became interested in psychoanalysis in Budapest a few years before World War I, undergoing psychoanalysis with Sándor Ferenczi, himself a close associate of Freud. Ferenczi urged her to study the psychoanalysis of young children, and in 1919 she produced her first paper in the field. Two years later she was invited by Karl Abraham to join the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, remaining there until 1926, when she moved to London. In The Psychoanalysis of Children (1932), she presented her observations and theory of child analysis. Believing children's play to be a symbolic way of controlling anxiety, she observed free play with toys as a means of determining the psychological impulses and ideas associated with the early years of life. Her object-relations theory related ego development during this period to the experience of various drive objects, physical objects that were associated with psychic drives. In early development, she found, a child relates to parts rather than to complete objects--for example, to the breast rather than to the mother. This unstable and primitive mode of identification was termed by Klein the paranoid-schizoid position. The next development phase is the depressive position, in which the infant comes to relate to whole objects, such as the mother or father. This phase is marked by the infant's recognition of the ambivalence of his feelings toward objects, and thus the moderation of his internal conflicts about them. Klein believed that the anxiety in the paranoid-schizoid position was persecutory, threatening the annihilation of the self, and the anxiety of the second, later position was depressive, being related to fear of the harm done to loved objects by the infant's own destructive impulses. Beginning in 1934 Klein used her work with adult patients to clarify and extend her ideas on infant and childhood anxiety, presenting her views in a number of papers and a book, Envy and Gratitude (1957). Her final work, published posthumously in 1961, Narrative of a Child Analysis, was based on detailed notes taken during 1941.

(c) 1998, britannica.com



Return to Main Page