Anna Freud: The Hampstead War Nurseries and the role of the direct observation of children for psychoanalysis

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infl uenced by Aichhorn’s work, which emphasized the impact of early deprivation 

and the need for emotional attachments in working with young delinquents, Anna 

Freud helped to establish fi rst the Hietzing School, in 1927, and then, 10 years 

later, the Jackson Nursery, an experiment in applying psychoanalytic principles 

to the care of the young child. From the beginning, in both of these settings, 

she encouraged the systematic recording of observations of children, although no 

records of these remain.

2

All of these projects, however, were interrupted by the rise of fascism in Europe. 

When Austria was overtaken by Nazi Germany, Sigmund Freud and his family fl ed 

Vienna, in June 1938—with Anna Freud bringing a set of children’s stretchers with 

her, as if in anticipation of what was to come. Soon Freud and his family had based 

themselves in the house in Maresfi eld Gardens in London where Freud was to die 

not much more than a year after his arrival in Britain. 

The Hampstead War Nurseries: The establishment of Anna Freud’s approach

3

With the death of her father and the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Anna Freud 

threw herself into work. Recognizing the need to provide shelters for children and 

their families who were rendered refugees or homeless by the war, she planned a 

temporary wartime shelter for children. As the scale of the diffi culties facing children 

in the cities became apparent, these plans soon began to grow.

Anna Freud and her lifelong companion, Dorothy Burlingham, opened the 

Children’s Rest Centre in London, in January 1941, with fi nancial support from 

the American Foster Parents’ Plan for War Children (AFPPWC) (see Figure 1). 

Most of the fi rst group of children who came to the Nursery —some with their 

mothers—were from the East End of London, much of which had been badly 

damaged in the fi rst bombings of the city, ‘the Blitz’. As the project developed, the 

AFPPWC increased its contribution so that the number of children at the Nursery 

rose to 30. In the summer of 1941, two additional buildings were equipped and 

opened: the Babies’ Rest Centre in Hampstead was a large residential nursery for 

babies and young children, caring for up to 50 children; the country house, called 

‘New Barn’, was an evacuation residence for 30 children aged 3–6 years. The 

three houses were included in the AFPPWC as the ‘Hampstead War Nurseries’ 

(Hellman, 1990).

2

In an obituary written after the death of Edith Jackson, who had provided the fi nancial support for the 

Nursery, Anna Freud wrote that the aim of this establishment had been to: ‘gather direct information 

about … earlier ages, particularly the second year of life, which we deemed all-important for the 

child’s essential advance from primary to secondary functioning; for the establishment of feeding and 

sleeping habits; for acquiring the rudiments of superego development and impulse control [and] for the 

establishment of object ties to peers’ (quoted by Young-Bruehl, 1991, p. 218).

3

The following account of the establishment of the Hampstead War Nurseries and the description of 

some of the observational fi ndings from the Nurseries is based on sections of a forthcoming chapter on 

Anna Freud’s contribution to psychoanalytic thinking about residential care (Midgley and Pretorius, 

in press). Thanks go to Dr Pretorius and the editors of the book, Tiago Sousa Mendes and Pedro Vaz 

Santos, for permission to make use of that material in this article.

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Figure 1 — Anna Freud (centre) and Dorothy Burlingham

in the garden of the London Nursery

© Anna Freud Centre, reproduced with permission

Although responding primarily to an urgent need to offer help to young children 

and their families who were victims of the London bombings and the policy of evacu-

ation, Anna Freud was clear from the start that the war situation—and the creation of 

a nursery to care for children affected by that war—was a ‘natural experiment’ that 

should be made use of (Edgcumbe, 2000). In defi ning the aims of the War Nurseries 

in 1942, Freud and Burlingham (1942, pp. 11–2) put the repair of damage already 

caused by the war and the prevention of further harm as the primary aims, but also 

named research and training as further aims. They put it in these terms:

To do research on the essential psychological needs of children; to study their reactions to 

bombing, destruction, and early separation from their families; to collect facts about the 

harmful consequences whenever their essential needs remain unsatisfi ed; to observe the 

general infl uence of community life at an early age on their development. (p. 12)

Looking back, Anna Freud described this observational research (perhaps somewhat 

over-modestly) as ‘no more than the by-product of intensive, charitable war work’, 

and, as all attempts to raise funds specifi cally for this research were unsuccessful, 

the observing, recording and classifying of material ‘had to be relegated to the spare 

off-time of the workers and was undertaken as their voluntary effort’ (A. Freud, 

1951, p. 145). Despite this, Anna Freud recognized that the War Nurseries were 

‘ideal for the purposes of observation’:

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