ABSTRACT
Anna Freud believed that psychoanalytic theory could exert a great deal of influence to change the way other applied fields understood the emotional life of children. She developed innovative ways of working in fruitful partnerships with the disciplines of paediatrics, education, and jurisprudence. Through the use of clinical examples and detailed theoretical development, Anna Freud explored the emotional reactions often displayed by physically ill young patients in hospital and other settings such as home and school. Her clinical examples highlighted the uniqueness of the experience for each child as influenced by diverse environmental and developmental variables. Seth was referred to the Anna Freud Centre by a nurse at the hospital where he had been recently diagnosed with diabetes at the age of ten. Discovering he was sick had been highly traumatic as Seth had nearly fallen into a hypoglycaemic coma.
