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

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analytic work with Martin and parent-work with his mother, which helped her to 

eventually speak to her son about what she knew of his father for the fi rst time, led 

to a freeing up of his learning inhibitions and an overall resumption of development. 

But what seems clear is that, while there were obvious continuities between the 

observational data from the Nursery and certain aspects of the analytic material that 

emerged in treatment, the nature of Martin’s defences as a child—as well as the 

inherent limitations of a purely observational approach—had ‘blurred the picture of 

his fantasies and his fundamental depression’ (p.54). 

Direct observation and analytic reconstruction: theoretical implications

The Hampstead War Nurseries had provided Anna Freud and her co-workers with a 

vast amount of observational data on early infancy, and with the establishment of the 

Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic in 1948 there was the opportunity both to continue 

such observational studies and to make links with data from the psychoanalytic treat-

ment of children. Instances such as the analysis of Martin—in which the same child 

was studied longitudinally using both direct observation and analytic reconstruc-

tion—led Anna Freud to review her understanding of the relation between these two 

forms of investigation in a paper given at the momentous ‘Stockbridge Symposium’ 

of 1950, organized by Ernst Kris, in which the relation between observational and 

analytic data was debated at length. 

Kris himself had opened the Symposium by reviewing the place of direct obser-

vation of children in the history of psychoanalysis. While such observations could 

be traced back at least as early as 1905, Kris recognized that a decisive shift took 

place in the 1920s, with the publication of Freud’s The ego and the id (1923) and 

the growing interest in the ‘pre-oedipal’ period of childhood (Kris, 1951, p. 9). At a 

later date, Anna Freud herself was to elaborate on this early history, in the opening 

chapter of her most important late work, Normality and pathology in childhood 

(1965). 

In that work, Anna Freud looked back on the way in which early analysts rejected 

direct observation of children as a legitimate form of psychoanalytic investigation, 

and the tendency ‘to keep the relations between analysis and surface observation 

wholly negative and hostile’ (1965, p. 12). The pioneering effort of these early 

analysts was to un-earth the ‘hidden impulses’ that were not directly accessible 

to observation, and to perfecting the analytic technique that so uniquely offered a 

glimpse of the unconscious depths. With the shift of focus to the ego in the 1920s, 

however, the analyst’s attention was ‘extended from the content and the derivatives 

of the unconscious mind … to the methods employed by the ego to keep them 

warded off from consciousness’ (p. 15). 

This shift—initiated by the publication of The ego and the id in 1923—led 

directly to the publication of Anna Freud’s own best-known work, The ego and the 

mechanisms of defence (1936). In that work, Anna Freud pointed out that the ego 

functions, including the defences, were far more amenable to direct observation than 

the deep unconscious that had been the exclusive focus of the early analysts. Defences 

such as ‘reaction formations’ could be inferred from direct observations, such as a 

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young boy’s excessive concern that something bad would happen to his father when 

he went out in the dark at night, or the child listening anxiously to his baby sibling’s 

breathing at night ‘lest he might die in his sleep’ (p. 16). While the direct observer 

is at a disadvantage to the analyst in other respects, ‘his status improves decisively 

with the inclusion of ego psychology into psychoanalytic work’:

There is, for one, no controversy about the use of observation outside the analytic session 

with regard to the confl ict-free sphere of the ego, that is, the various ego apparatuses that 

serve sensation and perception … Further, so far as the ego functions are concerned, the 

analyst is served in almost equal measure by observation inside and outside the analytic 

setting. (p. 22)

But Anna Freud also offers a word of caution about how far direct observation 

can contribute to psychoanalytic understanding. She pointed out that those things 

‘discovered’ by direct observation were only seen once the observers themselves 

had been analytically trained, and that ‘the most vital facts’ of early childhood had 

remained unnoticed by observers until they had been reconstructed from analytic 

work.

Indeed, in her earlier work Anna Freud had already recognized that the observa-

tions of infants and children made in the War Nurseries were not ‘objective’ in the 

traditional sense of the word, because they were already framed by pre-existent 

knowledge.

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 Their value lay more in ‘checking the children’s behaviour against the 

analytic assumptions about the hidden trends in the child’s mind’ (A. Freud, 1951, 

p. 148). While aware of the limitations of such work, she argued that such observa-

tions of children—such as those described above in relation to children’s responses 

to air-raids or early separations—could be used ‘to confi rm, to amend, or to widen 

existent analytic knowledge’ (p. 148, original italics). 

To give but one example, Anna Freud suggested that direct observation offered 

‘welcome confi rmation’ of the phases of libidinal development outlined by Freud 

and Abraham, although she noted a wide overlapping between the oral and the anal 

stages in young children. Moreover, the ‘vividness, colourfulness and convincing 

strength’ of such direct observations of the gradual growth and development of 

infantile sexuality, ‘undisturbed by later overlays’, led Anna Freud to conclude that 

‘every student of psychoanalysis should be given the opportunity to watch these 

phenomena at the time when they occur so as to acquire a picture against which 

he can check his later analytic reconstructions’ (p. 149). Direct observation could 

have equal value in giving reality to distinctions such as that between primary and 

secondary process thinking, or to the fusion of sexual and aggressive drives.

But various observations also led Anna Freud to amend certain aspects of 

received psychoanalytic ideas. For example, the War Nurseries’ observations 

noted that infants showed marked reactions of disgust before toilet training had 

started, despite a theoretical prediction to the contrary. Anna Freud also noticed 

that observations of young children imitating coitus were relatively frequent, 

although in the case of those children living in the Nurseries from birth ‘there was 

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And hence, as both Anna Freud and Klein discovered in the Controversial Discussions, they could not 

be used to settle theoretical differences about early childhood development (Steiner, 2000b).

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