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

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no possibility whatever of their having seen adults in sexual intimacy’. This, Anna 

Freud argued, ‘would throw doubt on some of our analytic reconstructions of 

early witnessing of a primal scene’, and could suggest a more innate, preformed, 

instinctual attitude (p. 160). 

Clearly inspired by how much psychoanalytic understanding could be learned 

from such direct observations of early infancy, Anna Freud worked with colleagues 

in Ohio to introduce infant observation for medical students at the Western 

Reserve University. After revisions of the curriculum led to all fi rst-year medical 

students doing regular observations of a mother and child from pregnancy through 

to nursery age,  Anna Freud visited the campus in 1952 to give a paper entitled 

‘Some remarks on infant observation’ (1953b). In this paper—written explicitly 

for a non-psychoanalytic audience—she gave her clearest statement of the values 

of psychoanalytically informed infant observation. 

In her talk, Anna Freud recognized how disorientating it can be to watch an infant 

in the fi rst days and weeks of life, and spoke of the importance of students being 

given some ‘guidance’ as to what they are watching and how to see. She describes 

very powerfully the young infant’s dependence and need for care, as well as the 

powerful states of ‘painful tension’ and relief that govern the young infant’s early 

life. She describes the interaction between constitution and environmental factors; 

the importance of the attachment to the mother; the various aspects of development, 

both cognitive and emotional; and the importance of early infantile sexual activity. 

She speaks also of the privilege of watching these earliest stages of development:

To witness this birth of the mind out of the body will be valued by most students as an 

impressive experience and one calculated to impart to them for their whole future medical 

career a wholesome respect for the strength of the human mind, for the signifi cance and the 

complexity of its functioning, and for the close interaction of the mind with the needs and 

functions of the human body. (p. 574)

Like other psychoanalysts of her generation, Anna Freud made only passing reference 

to the emotional impact of observation on the observer, and did not see the experi-

ence of processing these ‘countertransference’ reactions as the primary value of infant 

observation, in the way that many child and adult psychoanalytic trainings, including 

the Anna Freud Centre, would do today (see Sternberg, 2005, p. 85). For Anna Freud, 

infant observation was primarily a means to understand more about the workings of 

the mind at the earliest stages of life, and in particular to gain an appreciation of normal 

development against which degrees of clinical disturbance could be assessed.

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When she came to write of her ‘Ideal Psychoanalytic Institute’ (Freud, 1966), she therefore included 

the direct observation of children in the curriculum, but suggested it should come towards the end 

of training, so that it gave the candidate an opportunity to ‘check’ in development what he or she 

had learnt from analytic reconstructions in the consulting room. This was not actually the case in 

the training of the Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic (Anna Freud Centre), where a two-year parent 

and infant observation was introduced in 1962, starting during the pre-clinical year. The Hampstead 

Training also included the requirement for a toddler and a nursery observation, as Anna Freud felt it 

was equally important to have an understanding of normal development at these later stages of early 

childhood, e.g. to appreciate the shift from primary to secondary process thinking and the emergence of 

the superego.

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As an approach to research, Anna Freud was a staunch defender of the value 

of direct observation of infants, and strongly supported Ernst Kris in the early 

1950s, when he set up a longitudinal study of child development at the Yale Child 

Studies Center. Her own research at the Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic included 

many such observational studies, including that of blind children and longitudinal 

research on the children of the Hampstead War Nurseries and child survivors of the 

Holocaust (A. Freud and Dann, 1951). In this respect Anna Freud’s work could be 

seen as a precursor of the infant observation research of the ‘baby-watchers’ such as 

Stern (1985), Murray (1988) and Brazelton and Tronick (1980).

Conclusion: Observation versus psychoanalysis?

Anna Freud’s positive view of the contribution to psychoanalysis made by the 

direct observation of children has been criticized by some, such as Green (2000), 

who has seen such a development as a ‘behaviouristic, biologistic, adaptational 

and reductionistic psychologization of psychoanalysis, coming from American ego 

psychology’ (Steiner, 2000a, p. 6). In particular, Green argues that the Freudian 

concept of Nachträglichkeit, or ‘deferred action’, means that no event experienced 

by the infant in the ‘here and now’ can be of psychoanalytic signifi cance, because of 

the way in which meaning is attributed retrospectively.

Perhaps surprisingly, given Anna Freud’s associations with precisely this 

ego-psychological development within psychoanalysis that Green criticizes, she 

would probably have been rather sympathetic to his point of view. In her published 

papers, Anna Freud acknowledged time and time again the immense advantages 

of the analytic setting, in which the processes of transference and interpretation 

lead to increasingly deeper levels of material being brought to the surface in a way 

that direct observation rarely has access to (1953a, p. 287). Moreover, in the years 

after the war, analyses of children such as ‘Martin’, described above, who had been 

infants in the War Nurseries, led Anna Freud to appreciate how many aspects of 

early infantile experience could not have been appreciated by direct observations, 

even of the most careful and psychoanalytic type. 

Speaking at the IPA Congress in 1957, Anna Freud looked back at her attitude 

expressed a few years earlier, and explained,

When I took part in the Stockbridge Symposium, I came fresh from several years of work 

in a children’s institution which offered opportunities for long-term observations of children 

on an almost twenty-four hour basis (i.e. the War Nurseries). Naturally, I was impressed by 

the additions to our insight, especially with regard to the processes of maturation, which 

such an opportunity provides … To the present discussion, on the other hand, I come from 

several years’ work in a children’s clinic which gives me the possibility to follow the analytic 

treatment of large numbers of children’s cases of all ages and descriptions. I am, therefore, 

under the fresh impression of the overwhelming advantage of the analytic method itself over 

all other methods of observation and, as analysts tend to be, inclined to look down on all other 

ways and means of gaining access to the child’s mind. (pp. 96–7)

Foreshadowing many of the reservations that Green was to voice over 40 years 

later, Anna Freud, at the Ernst Kris Memorial Meeting later that year, gave the 

example of childhood trauma. Analytic treatment of those who had been victims 

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