Early Writings

Pioneering work in the field of child analysis

In 1922, Anna Freud was admitted to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (WPV) with her paper, "Beating Fantasies and Daydreams". She soon began working with both adults and children, aged six to twelve. Since young patients were always sent by their parents, she placed particular emphasis on longer introductory phases to build trust, in order to "transform the decision to undergo analysis from an external one into an internal one" (Anna Freud, 1927).

At Berggasse 19, she frequently met with psychoanalysts and educators August Aichhorn, Siegfried Bernfeld, and Willi Hoffer on Saturday evenings as part of a working group. Their discussions addressed pedagogical questions, Melanie Klein’s theories, and their own techniques in child psychoanalysis. Unlike Klein, Anna Freud did not believe that play could replace free association.

Later, she collaborated with Aichhorn, Bernfeld, and Hoffer on the editorial board of the Journal for Psychoanalytic Pedagogy, where, in 1931, she became one of the editors.

A new focus: the ego functions

Anna Freud’s books Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis (1927) and Introduction to Psychoanalysis for Educators (1930) are based on lectures and presentations. In 1936, she published her first major independent theoretical work: The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. In it, she shifted her focus to the ego—a move that some of her colleagues considered revolutionary.

The book, structured into twelve chapters, provides an overview of the technical and theoretical developments of the time, as well as a catalog and description of all known defense mechanisms. Anna Freud classified these mechanisms according to the three sources of anxiety that her father had already described in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926): realistic anxiety, neurotic anxiety (instinctual fear), and moral anxiety (superego anxiety). Through numerous case studies, she illustrated how different types of anxiety correspond to specific defense mechanisms. This work also marked the first detailed explanation of the defense mechanism of “identification with the aggressor.”