Anna Freud and Developmental Psychoanalytic Psychology

When reviewed in its entirety, Anna Freud’s legacy represents her efforts to address the deepest of metapsychological dilemmas: What moves development along, and is it inherently progressive and linear? She created a developmental psychoanalytic psychology that is remarkably current and draws upon principles of neurobiology, genetics, pediatrics, and social psychology. Her general developmental psychology builds upon three fundamental notions: (1) development proceeds not predominantly stage-based but more continuous and cumulative, with progressions and regressions; (2) progression along developmental lines involves the maturational push of innate or biologic givens as well as the interaction between biology and environmental conditions; and (3) understanding the complexities of normal development is a means of understanding the presence or absence of psychopathology in any given symptomatic presentation. These contributions and the notion of a developmental psychoanalytic psychology are reviewed through the contemporary lens of the field of developmental psychopathology. The enduring contributions of Anna Freud’s developmental psychoanalytic psychology to child psychiatry and child development are in asking how mind and body are brought together, and in asserting that the interaction between the biologic and the mental remains the common ground of all disciplines concerned with children.