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  • Memories of Anna Freud
  • Hansi Kennedy
Abstract

In her memories of Anna Freud, her teacher and mentor for more than forty years, the author recalls her first introduction to psychoanalysis in The Hampstead War Nurseries and the compelling learning experience it provided in the context of direct and intensive contact with the needs and conflicts of some eighty infants and young children. To illustrate some of the innovative practices Anna Freud introduced to help the children adapt to residential care, the author describes the initial difficulties followed by great spurts in development when small family groups were introduced to meet the children’s attachment needs. It is difficult to remember that these were indeed new ideas fifty-four years ago.

The Centenary of Anna Freud’s birth is an opportune moment to reassess and confirm her enormous contributions to psychoanalysis and to permit individuals to recall the impact of their encounters with her. As one privileged to have had a forty-year-long connection with her—from 1941 when I started my working life as a trainee in The Hampstead War Nurseries, throughout my post-war training as a child psychotherapist, and later as a member of staff at The Hampstead Clinic (now The Anna Freud Centre)—I have been asked to contribute “my memories.” Anna Freud’s influence as a brilliant teacher and mentor who instilled in me a zest for inquiry was pervasive, but with hindsight, perhaps most influential in the War Nurseries. The introduction of psychoanalytic thinking in the context of direct and intensive contact with the needs and conflicts of a large number of young children was a most compelling learning period and provided the bedrock for my later clinical psychoanalytic work with children.

The War Nurseries opened in 1941 1 at a time when the East End of London had been reduced to rubble and chaos through weeks of nightly air raid attacks. At the time there was [End Page 205] a considerable demand for residential care of young children whose homes had been destroyed and families separated by war conditions. While most school-age children had been evacuated to the country, mothers wanted their children in a place of safety and accessibility.

Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham grasped this opportunity to continue their observational studies, started in the Jackson Nursery in Vienna and abruptly interrupted after little more than one year by Hitler’s invasion of Austria. 2 They found financial support to open two residential homes—a house in the country for school-age children and a London home for under-fives—where optimal care could be provided for eighty to one hundred children separated from their parents for the duration of the war.

Unlike the typical residential nurseries at that time, The Hampstead War Nurseries aimed to involve absent parents as much as possible. The London house was open to visiting at all hours. Mothers of infants who wanted to breastfeed were offered employment in the household, others came in the evening after work to play with or put their children to bed, or early in the morning after a factory night shift. Some of the three-year-olds with previous traumatic separation experiences were grief-stricken on entering the nursery and their mothers were encouraged to stay with them during the settling-in period. Others showed signs of distress by giving up developmental achievements. Initially tearful reunions and separations with visiting parents were the order of the day, but this improved rapidly where visits were regular and reliable.

From the beginning it had been decided that a high staff-child ratio would be needed to ensure not only proper care of the children but also time for unhurried attention to their individual needs. In addition to the carefully selected and well-trained senior staff and their assistants, Anna Freud appointed some twenty teenagers, with a calling for work with children but with no previous experience, as trainees or as students. Many of them had themselves recently undergone “evacuation experiences” having arrived in England under a government sponsored scheme for unaccompanied refugee [End Page 206] children from Nazi persecution. These trainees, also separated from their families, found a home in the War...

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