Anna Freud, responding to our paper on projection, in which we noted that Freud had first used the term in 1895, giggled and said, “Projection and I were born in the same year.” This year, then, is the centenary of her birth. We hope that it will be the occasion for a comprehensive explication of her many contributions to the theory and technique of psychoanalysis and of her creative application of psychoanalytic thinking to a wide range of other fields. But here we would like to share some more personal impressions.
We first met Anna Freud in 1965 when she was nearly seventy years old. At an age when most people are ready to retire, she was entering her most productive period We saw her at the Hampstead Clinic (now the Anna Freud Center), in her various roles as clinician, teacher, theoretician, and researcher during this last period of her life.
What informed her work at Hampstead could be described as Anna Freud's theoretical style, with its emphasis on multidimensional understanding, its rootedness n psychoanalytic history, its empirical base, and its assumption that child psychoanalytic experience is integral to the growth of psychoanalysis. This is a point of view perhaps most clearly articulated in her 1966 paper “The Ideal Psychoanalytic Institute: A Utopia.” What she did not say explicitly in that paper was that she was describing the Hampstead Clinic training program. All trainings differ in their curricula, theoretical orientation, style, and so forth. But the Hampstead training had a practical difference that made it unique. It was full-time, with all its activities conducted in three old houses in Maresfield Gardens, just down the street from Freud's last home, the house in which Miss Freud and Dorothy Burlingham still lived. Miss Freud made the Hampstead Clinic like a family, with only some of the drawbacks and many of the advantages. Students and staff alike waited for patients, made coffee, wrote notes, and found toys in the cupboard in the common room; we all ate lunch and had tea together in the dining room. And everyone spent the whole day seeing patients and attending clinical and research meetings. In the middle of a working day, some of the most eminent psychoanalysts in Europe and America could be found listening to and discussing clinical material shared comfortably by students and staff. Clinical material was discussed all day, every day—formally in meetings, less formally in supervision, and more casually in the common room or dining room, or on the sidewalk where Miss Freud frequently stopped to remark on an item from a weekly report on a patient.
Anna Freud's capacity to listen respectfully and her willingness to talk about her own clinical experience created an atmosphere of safety to share and excitement to explore. In a 1976 paper on the identity of the psychoanalyst, she summarized the difficulties attaching to a training analysis, but also stressed its positive aspects: “besides identification, and transference, and indoctrination, there is also another attribute of the training analysis which I would call inspiration.” Anna Freud has been an inspiration for all her students, a role model in particular ways, which we have only gradually realized over the years. When people trained at Hampstead from any era get together, we take for granted that we want to share our work, talk about the cases we are treating, and help and learn from one another. This is the tradition passed on to us by Anna Freud.
Miss Freud was walking down Maresfield Gardens one day in 1978, when we were showing our young children the place where we had worked. She greeted us, shook the children's hands in the way she had of treating children respectfully, and said, “I'm glad that my students always return with the grandchildren.”