October 9: Anna Freud

Anna Freud, who extended her father Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories into the world of children, died in London on this date in 1982. She was psychoanalyzed by her father from 1918 to 1922 and began her own practice in 1923. Her best-known book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of the Defense, was published in 1936. Interrogated by the Gestapo two years later, she fled with her ailing father to Great Britain, where after his death in 1939 she she co-founded the Hampstead Nursery for war orphans. Her work there inspired three books and gave rise to a life-long companionship and collaboration with her co-founder, Dorothy Burlingham, whose children Freud helped to raise.

“How one can live without being able to judge oneself, criticize what one has accomplished, and still enjoy what one does, is unimaginable to me.” —Anna Freud