London
What children need in times of war
In response to the air raids (the “Blitz”) on London in 1940, Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham established wartime children’s homes, the Hampstead War Nurseries. These nurseries provided a safe environment for children who had lost their homes or parents, or whose mothers had to bring them into air-raid shelters every night for protection, ensuring they were cared for and shielded from the impact of war as much as possible. In total, three war nurseries were opened in 1941: two in the London district of Hampstead and another in Essex.
These facilities also served as institutes for child psychoanalysis, with research findings regularly published. Freud and Burlingham observed, among other things, that the breakdown of family cohesion affected children more severely than the war itself. Unlike other children’s homes, the Hampstead War Nurseries placed special emphasis on maintaining regular visits from mothers and fostering sibling bonds.
Blind children and twins from a psychoanalytic perspective
Dorothy Burlingham’s research focused on blind children and twins, subjects that had previously been largely overlooked in psychoanalytic literature. While still in Vienna, she observed and analyzed students at the Israelitisches Blinden-Institut on the Hohe Warte. She soon recognized that the unconscious perceptions of blind children were primarily based on misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the external world and could only be accessed “indirectly, via their conscious awareness” (Burlingham, 1914).
In her 1950 monograph Twins, she examined the relationship between identical twins and their inner worlds. Her findings were informed by observations from the Hampstead War Nurseries. Among the 191 children in the war nurseries, there were six sets of twins, including four sets of identical twins. She observed three of these pairs over an extended period: Bert and Bill, Madge and Mary, and Bessie and Jessie, who were admitted in July 1941, when they were not yet four months old.
