ABSTRACT
This chapter traces Anna Freud's understanding of the nature of sibling relationships from the earliest longitudinal observations of infants and their families, through her work in the Hampstead War Nurseries, to her post-war work in the Hampstead Clinic. The War Nurseries provided a tremendous opportunity for the longitudinal study of children and their relationships to biological siblings and nursery peers, as well as to parent substitutes. Sibling relationships are at the centre of Anna Freud's first psychoanalytic publication, "Beating Fantasies and Daydreams", which gained her membership of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on 31 May 1922. In "Beating Fantasies and Daydreams", Anna Freud examined the impact of siblings on the child's relationship to the parent. Anna Freud applied the "Collective analytic memory"—the Hampstead Psychoanalytic Index—in an attempt to come to grips with the complexity of human development, resulting in her concept of the Developmental Lines.
