In TAP 28/2 Anne-Marie Sandler described the history, present activities, and future plans of the Anna Freud Center in Hampstead, England. In her article she outlined the influence of the Center's training, research, and practice, an influence that extends to developmental theory and the technique of child psychoanalysis as practiced worldwide. The Center has trained not only students from Britain but also many from Europe, Israel, and the Americas, who undertake all or part of its official curriculum. Anna Freud's generous policy, followed by her successors, was to allow analysts from other countries to visit the Center and sit in on its scientific and educational activities. Following are accounts, by three American psychoanalysts, of their learning experiences at the Center.
I was privileged to attend the Center's scientific meetings and daily conferences, and to observe the nursery school for one or two weeks, twice annually over a period of twelve years or so when Miss Freud was alive, and have continued to visit the Center occasionally and deliver papers. I have attended the yearly scientific symposia from their inception. Miss Freud's brilliance and clinical acumen was truly inspirational: there were so many highly talented people on the clinic staff, and the research conducted there was fascinating. My experiences at the clinic provided contact with therapeutic work with children that has contributed invaluably to my practice, teaching, and writing. But even more important than the gains for my thinking about child development and therapy—I am not a child analyst, but have always wanted to be one—was the impact on blind and other deprived children of the nursery school and the conferences. It was this that gave me a sense of the possibility of psychoanalytic prophylaxis. Watching the work of the clinic over a period of many years, I saw a coordination of education and therapy made possible by a deep knowledge of, and devoted attention to, the individual child and its family. If only one had what Freud called the therapeutic power of Emperor Joseph—enough money and power to be able to fashion institutions of education for children like those of the Center, with psychoanalytically trained teachers and assistants who can give each child the informed attention he or she deserves—how much could be done to loosen the grip of neurosis or even worse on future lives. This is a discouragingly difficult but not impossible goal, and those rare and precious places where it is being attempted, like the Anna Freud Center, deserve the support of all of us.
As a typical product of my generation, soon after high school I was in the army during World War II and, after that, found myself rushing back to college, rushing successively into medical school, marriage, psychiatric training and practice, analytic training, and building an analytic practice. It seemed there would be no wanderlust for me! But I rebelled and decided, with my wife's encouragement, to plan for a year's sabbatical. And the plans worked out! At the age of forty-six, with children in college and the rest in high school, we did it. Neither wealthy nor full-time academics, we found ways to pay for it nonetheless.
The only place in the world in a position to welcome visitors like me (and to keep those visitors as busy as they might wish to be) was the Hampstead Clinic, now, of course, the Anna Freud Center. It was a joy to feel accepted and be accepted there. For many reasons that I won't attempt to list, one of the most important expectations, and one that was realized, was the opportunity to witness Miss Freud spontaneously at work. Her creativeness was astonishing; equally so was her ability to draw gifted people together for work, study, and research, engendering in them the sense that they were sharing mutually in the growth of our field.
It was a wonderful experience. Not always, mind you. For one thing, I missed actual clinical work. For another, in some ways a year was not nearly long enough. For still another, I am the sort of person who tends to get out of step with other people. Finally, totally aside from professional life, we were a large and variegated family. If we were not all too human, at least we were human. But I think that year changed the lives of all of us, and, if it is at all possible to sum up those changes, I am convinced they were positive for each of us. What we have in experience is worth a lot more than, for example, the small apartment building in New Orleans's French Quarter that was sold to pay for part of that year.
Many excursions in unexpected directions were possible during that year. That luxury would not have been afforded me at home, because of what I (and everyone else I knew) presumed were the pressures of private practice and everyday life. I had thought of myself as a fairly flexible sort of person, but I was astonished during the first few weeks in London when I realized that I was anxious because I could do, or not do, whatever I pleased, as long as it didn't interfere with anyone else.
Although most of my working time in London was spent with the various research groups at the Hampstead Clinic, a striking opportunity came through the generosity of Moses Laufer and his team to observe parts of their research on adolescence at Brent House, an entity totally independent of the Clinic but strongly endorsed by Miss Freud. I believe all of the participants there were also connected with the Clinic. The idea that some two dozen psychoanalysts at Brent House, and so many more at the Clinic itself, could work analytically, keep records, and supervise one another in working groups dedicated to research was both mind-boggling and exhilarating.
It is hard to believe that a fairly large number of people have had similar adventures. More would, I am sure, if only they understood that these experiences are much more possible than conventional wisdom holds.
Since 19671 have visited and participated regularly in conferences and scholarly activities at the Anna Freud Center, known before Anna Freud's death in 1982 as the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic. From the late 1960s until the 1980s I had the privilege of working closely with Anna Freud, Joseph and Sonja Goldstein, and Dorothy Burlingham as we wrote the trilogy Before…, Beyond…, and In the Best Interests of the Child.
During a sabbatical year, 1983–84, I participated, two or three times a week, in the nursery school and in clinical and other staff conferences at the Center. Over the years I have also arranged for medical and other graduate students, pediatricians, and applicants for training from the United States to spend short periods of time at the Center as observers at the nursery school
and as participants in the clinical and staff conferences. For myself and many others, those experiences and exercises were received as the Center's generous gift to our psychoanalytic understanding.
Since its founding, the Anna Freud Center has been an intellectual treasure of the modem Western world. Its development by Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham, followed by the leadership of Hansi Kennedy, Clifford Yorke, George Moran, Rose Edgcumbe, and now Anne-Marie Sandler, has provided a model center of clinical, training, and research activities in child psychoanalysis. Extraordinary applications of child psychoanalysis have been made in setting up superb services for the treatment, education, and care of poor children and of children at risk from biological deficits, violence, and social crises.
The Anna Freud Center, through its example and its productivity, has contributed substantially to American psychoanalysis by training child psychoanalysts (many now practicing in the U.S.), and through advancing and disseminating theoretical and technical knowledge based on systematic research and publications. The Center follows its founder's example by demonstrating how clinical child psychoanalysis can respond to the needs of children in crisis and to children who are impaired. In return, American psychoanalysis has contributed to the Center through scientific collaboration and financial support.
A concrete example of this vital collaboration is the Anna Freud Foundation (Peter B. Neubauer, treasurer; Albert J. Solnit, secretary; and Alice B. Colonna, associate secretary), founded by Kurt Eissler and other senior colleagues to raise money in the U.S. for the Center and its activities. Another example is The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, an annual publication created by Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and Ernst Kris, now in its fiftieth volume.