Anna Freud & Dorothy Burlingham

Together – Before and After the War

Anna Freud starts her (training) analysis with her father after 1918. Such a close relationship between analyst and patient is unthinkable today, but at the time it was not unusual. C. G. Jung, Karl Abraham, and Melanie Klein also analyzed their own children.

Anna Freud, who enjoyed needlework all her life, takes a course at a carpet and tapestry weaving school in 1923. In 1925, she meets the American Dorothy Burlingham who is seeking psychoanalytical treatment for her son Bob, an asthma patient. When Anna agrees to undertake Bob’s analysis, Dorothy and her four children move to Vienna.

Initially in analysis with Theodor Reik, Dorothy Burlingham becomes Sigmund Freud’s patient in 1927. In 1929, she moves into the apartment two floors above the Freud family. The two women form a close relationship. They would work and live together until their death.

In 1931, the two women purchase an old farmhouse in Hochrotherd in the Vienna Woods which they fill with colorful rustic furniture. After the Freuds’ emigration into London exile, these furnishings find a new home in a weekend house in Walberswick on the east coast of England. After the end of the war, Anna Freud tries to annul the sale of the estate in Hochrotherd, which had been sold below value in 1938, its proceeds going to the German ‘Reich’, but without success.

Anna Freud doesn’t return to Vienna until 1971, when she travels there on the occasion of the 27th Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), visiting the recently opened memorial exhibition in rooms of her father’s former practice. At the Congress, she presents her plan to establish a library at Berggasse 19, asking her IPA colleagues for book donations.