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Sigmund Freud (1909) reported on the analysis of a little boy caught in a conflict between desire for his mother and his fear of his father's retaliation for his wish. This concern with the child's struggle to reconcile desire and the demands of the outside world was the focus of the work of Anna Freud and her fellow child analyst-educators in Vienna between the two world wars. Meeting as a study group, the Kinderseminar explored the insights gained from the psychoanalysis of children to the study of education. This chapter focuses on the emergence of this psychoanalytic perspective on education in the work of Anna Freud and her colleagues Siegfried Bernfeld, Willi Hoffer, and August Aichhorn (later to include Dorothy Burlingham, Eva Rosenfeld, and teachers at the Matchbox demonstration school whose educational philosophy was inspired by the Kinderseminar). The work of the Kinderseminar has provided the foundation for the psychoanalytic study of education from interwar Vienna to more recent psychoanalytic study of education in England and the United States.
In her biography of Anna Freud, Young-Bruehl (1988) reports, “In the 1920s Bernfeld and Hoffer came to Berggasse 19 to join Anna Freud for an informal study circle. Their fourth partner was a bit older—seventeen years older than Anna Freud—and much more experienced with children and adolescents. This was August Aichhorn” (p. 100).
The Kinderseminar, founded by Anna Freud and her colleagues, met regularly in the waiting room Miss Freud shared with her father. Initially focusing on a psychoanalytic approach to learning and teaching, these meetings became the foundation