ABSTRACT
Anna Freud was born in Vienna in 1895, the sixth (and last) child of Sigmund and Martha Freud. From the very beginning, her life was inextricably linked with the history of psychoanalysis: she was born in the year that her father published his first major work (with Josef Breuer), Studies on Hysteria, and she made her first appearance in the psychoanalytic literature before the age of five, when her dream about eating strawberries was included in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900). By the age of 14 she was already sitting in on the meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and listening to the discussions taking place between Freud, Adler, Rank, Ferenczi, Jung and others; she was in her own analysis with her father at the age of 22; and by the age of 26, having already worked as an elementary school teacher for a number of years, she was herself accepted as a member of the Society, and soon took up senior positions in both the Vienna Society and the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). For the rest of her life Anna Freud was to maintain a position at the forefront of the psychoanalytic movement, becoming Honorary President of the IPA in 1973, a position that she retained until her death in 1982. When the City University of New York conducted surveys among American psychiatrists and psychoanalysts in 1971, in which they were asked to nominate their most ‘outstanding colleague’, Anna Freud’s name was at the top of both polls (Peters, 1985: xiv).
