Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham established the residential Hampstead Nurseries during World War II to house children evacuated from central London to escape the bombing raids. After the war, Anna Freud and her colleagues transformed the nurseries into a clinic for the psychoanalytic treatment of children and adolescents, a preschool for underprivileged children, and a center for training child and adolescent psychoanalysts with a full-time, four-year curriculum.
Many graduates of this program became child analytic clinicians and researchers, while others pursued adult analytic training in London and in various institutes in the United States. The Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic became a center for research in child development from which a number of books and a flood of psychoanalytic papers were published. Support for the Hampstead Clinic came from charitable gifts, most of which were solicited by Anna Freud herself and from funding of psychoanalytic research when this was an active interest of the National Institutes of Mental Health and other charitable foundations including some in Great Britain.
Even before Anna Freud's death in 1982, government and foundation support began to wane. As psychoanalytic researchers in the United States and elsewhere well know, these resources essentially are no more.
In 1983, the directorship of the clinic, renamed the Anna Freud Centre, was held by the team of Hansi Kennedy and Clifford Yorke, longtime participants in the life and work of the Hampstead Clinic. Subsequent directors were George Moran, Anne-Marie Sandler, and Julia Fabricius. All had to deal with challenges to the way the center was functioning and the purposes that it served. These were much the same challenges responsible for the demise of a number of cherished psychoanalytically oriented institutions in the United States, the most recent of which is the Menninger Clinic. These challenges included increasing expenses, decreasing income, diminishing grant support, and a contracting pool of accessible patients. I learned of these difficult circumstances in the 1990s during my time as a member of the board of trustees of the Anna Freud Centre.
After Fabricius announced her retirement, the board focused on several prospects for the future, one of which was to advertise for a new director I was invited to be an external participant in interviewing the short list this past May. The board members had worked long and hard on this issue; two years previously, they had concluded that a radically new direction for the center was necessary for a variety of reasons. What direction, exactly, would come from a new director whose application, it was hoped, would sketch out a realistic proposal for the future of the Anna Freud Centre.
The board was extremely sensitive and careful in the way it approached the complex issues involved. It gathered considerable expert advice in coming to its decision about how to advertise for the position of director, and it gave extremely careful consideration to those whom it interviewed at length, coming finally to a unanimous decision. Ultimately, a triumvirate was appointed to the directorship: Linda Mayes (chair), Peter Fonagy (chief executive), and Mary Target (professional director).
The board faced the distressing and inevitable fact that it could no longer support the training program in its current form, though it sought long and hard for a solution. The troika directorate proposed that the center continue with those accepted for and in the process of training, but that another venue or strong partnerships should be sought for certain costly aspects of the training in future years. In this proposal, the complex training program would have the same objectives, quality, and staff, but aspects of it would be housed in a different place where it could be better supported than the center is currently capable of doing.
I have heard about some discontent with these decisions and actions of the board, apparently based on a wish to preserve Anna Freud's legacy and a fear that the board and new directorate aim to destroy that legacy.
Robert L. Tyson, M.D., F.A.P.A., F.R.C.Psych., is a training and supervising analyst (adult and child) for the San Diego Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He is also a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, and a globally elected representative from North America to the IPA Board of Representatives.
The notion that things should stay the same was certainly not Sigmund Freud's perspective, nor was it what I gathered from Anna Freud and the various study groups at the Hampstead Clinic in which I participated during my seven years in London.
All during Anna Freud's lifetime in London, there was constant ferment, change, and ongoing research in various directions. She approved of and participated in some of this work; she remained unconvinced about other ideas but nonetheless supported their exploration. To my mind, the Hampstead Clinic was a breath of fresh air compared with the analytic atmosphere in many other places at the time.
I think those interested in the welfare of the Anna Freud Centre and in the future of psychoanalysis—and this includes psychoanalytic practice; psychoanalytic theory; and psychoanalysis of children, adolescents, and adults and associated training and research—can be satisfied that the center's future rests in the hands of the highly experienced clinicians and researchers appointed as the new directorate. They deserve all the support and understanding that we can give them.