ABSTRACT
The youngest daughter of Sigmund and Martha Bernays Freud, Anna Freud was born in Vienna, Austria, on 3 December 1895, and died in London on 8 October 1982 at eighty-six years of age. Anna Freud had a unique exposure to the dynamics of psychoanalysis by being treated by her father from 1918 to 1922. Anna Freud founded the Hampstead Clinic Therapy Course in 1947, where she gave courses and seminars; then, in 1952, she added the Clinic, where she and her peers continued the care of children. Anna Freud became interested in the growth of the ego and in the problems of adaptation, and for a time worked with Heinz Hartmann, one of the founders of ego psychology, before he left Vienna for the United States. Anna Freud’s major contributions in psychoanalytic theory are: the mechanisms of defence; developmental lines; the diagnostic profile for the assessment of the child; and a technique for the analysis of the child.
