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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
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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).
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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