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

946

N

ICK

 M

IDGLEY

whether it was his fault that she had now become ill (p. 191). In his case, it was 

as if the separation was a punishment for all his bad thoughts and behaviours, and 

he now needed to try and compensate for what he had ‘made’ happen. In a normal 

family situation, the hostile and aggressive thoughts of the young child are balanced 

by the ongoing experience of the parent’s ‘survival’ of such feelings, which makes 

them both tolerable and thinkable. But the sudden separation from parents could be 

experienced as a confi rmation of the child’s deepest anxieties. Anna Freud wrote,

The child is frightened by [the parents’] absence, and suspects that their desertion may be 

another punishment or even the consequences of his own bad wishes. To overcome this guilt 

he overstresses all the love which he has ever felt for his parents. This turns the natural pain 

of separation into an intense longing which is hard to bear. (p. 189)

How did the children in the Nursery express their reactions to the various upheavals, 

traumas and separations that they had experienced so early in their lives? Whereas 

adults are more likely to use speech to help process such complex experiences, Anna 

Figure 4

© Anna Freud Centre, reproduced with permission

---

947

A

NNA

 F

REUD

: T

HE

 H

AMPSTEAD

 W

AR

 N

URSERIES

Freud describes how children’s modes of communication are somewhat different. Few 

children spoke about the bombings they had witnessed or the deaths they had experi-

enced until months, or in some cases years, after the actual events had happened. War 

games, however, were ubiquitous, especially games involving air-raids. Such play 

could either be a way of mastering anxiety, through repetition, or of denying reality. 

For example Bertie, aged 4, who had lost his father in an air-raid, would play frequent 

games where he would build houses out of paper and then drop small marbles on 

them like bombs. But the point of Bertie’s play was that all the people were saved just 

in time, and all the houses that were destroyed were soon rebuilt. Bertie appeared to 

be denying the reality of what had happened—but, because this was never entirely 

successful, the game was repeated almost obsessively, until a time came, some months 

later, when he was fi nally able to speak about his father’s death (p. 197).

Figure 5

© Plan (formerly Foster Parents Plan), reproduced with permission

Equally common among the children were various regressions to more infantile 

modes of behaviour. Young children who had just begun to stay dry at night before 

separating from their parents began to wet themselves again; those who had learned 

to curb their aggressive behaviour developed frequent temper tantrums; and almost 

all children returned to sucking their thumb or other ‘autoerotic’ behaviour. ‘When 

the attachment to the parents is destroyed’, wrote Anna Freud, speaking of the 

child’s gradual renunciation of instinctual pleasures as part of education, ‘all these 

new achievements lose their value for the child … There is no sense anymore in 

being good, clean, or unselfi sh’ (p. 201).

---

948

N

ICK

 M

IDGLEY

Very soon after starting work in the Hampstead War Nurseries, Anna Freud 

became acutely aware—as others, such as Winnicott and Bowlby, were realizing 

too—that the policy of evacuation, while saving many children from one kind 

of danger, was creating other consequences that might be equally harmful to 

children: the consequences of broken attachments. With the policy of mass evacu-

ation of children from major suburban areas such as London, ‘billeted’ children 

were saved from physical harm, but not from the emotional consequences of 

separation from home and family, which were only gradually appreciated later 

(Bowlby, 1951). 

Anna Freud’s awareness of the likely negative effect of broken attachments led to 

the decision to involve the absent parents as much as possible. Unlike typical British 

residential nurseries, mothers (and fathers) were given free access to their children 

day and night. Mothers were encouraged to live in and work as housekeepers so 

that they could nurse their babies; sibling groups were accepted together; and the 

buildings were open to visitors at all hours. While employing mothers in the kitchen 

and household areas of the Nursery alleviated some practical diffi culties of fi nding 

staff, it more importantly enabled some children to remain close to their mothers 

(A. Freud, 1973, p. 143).

But, despite the best attempts to maintain links with parents, the conditions of 

war did not always make ongoing contact possible, and many of the familiar diffi -

culties of traumatized and institutionalized children began to be apparent. Despite 

the care provided, some children showed a delay in their development in terms of 

wetting and soiling, aggressive behaviour and tantrums, or emotional withdrawal 

and self-stimulation (e.g. head-banging and masturbation). Anna Freud recognized 

that, while the physical and intellectual needs of the children were being met—often 

in ways that were ‘superior’ to home life—it was the emotional needs of the child 

that were most likely to suffer in a residential setting. In particular, the attachment 

needs of the child—and the subsequent developments that took place as a result of 

such an attachment—were more or less unsatisfi ed within the residential setting 

(A. Freud and Burlingham, 1944, p. 560). 

As a consequence, after the Hampstead War Nurseries had been running for a 

year, Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham reorganized the nursery population into 

‘artifi cial families’ of four or fi ve children and one ‘mother’, formed according to the 

preferences of the staff and the young children. This reorganization had immediate 

effects on the children:

The result of this arrangement was astonishing in its force and immediacy. The need for 

individual attachment … came out in a rush and in the course of one week all six families 

were completely and fi rmly established. (A. Freud, 1973, p. 220)

With the development of positive relationships to carers, children were quickly 

able to overcome developmental delays (such as in relation to feeding or sleeping) 

and developed an emotional ‘aliveness’ that is so often absent in institutionalized 

children. But the consequences of this reorganization were not straightforwardly 

positive. While noting that the children showed more animation and became 

more amenable to educational infl uence, the creation of ‘artifi cial families’ also 

---