Harvard Lectures

Anna Freud, the youngest of Sigmund Freud's six children, and the only one to make her career in psychoanalysis, was born in Vienna on 3 December 1895. Starting her professional life as a schoolteacher, she became a member of the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society in 1922. She maintained a lifelong interest in education, and her extensive contributions in this field were matched by those in all aspects of family law, pediatrics, as well as psychoanalytic psychology, normal and abnormal. Her work in Vienna was brought to an end by the Nazi occupation and she found sanctuary in London with her parents in 1938. Her father died in the following year, but Anna Freud maintained the tradition he began in her work as a member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society and as the founder of the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic - now the Anna Freud Centre. Her services to psychoanalysis were recognized by the award of the CBE in 1967 and by a large number of honorary doctorates on both sides of the Atlantic, including as a gesture of reparation, an honorary MD from the University of Vienna. She died on 9 October 1982. Joseph Sandler qualified as a psychoanalyst in the British Psychoanalytical Society. He was the Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis in the University of London and Director of the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London, and in private practice in London. He was formerly the first Sigmund Freud Professor of Psychoanalysis at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Editor of the 'International Journal of Psychoanalysis' and the 'International Review of Psychoanalysis', and was President of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

'This remarkable series of introductory lectures on psychoanalysis is, in fact, a lucid, elegant and profound overview of classic psychoanalytic theory, in which Anna Freud spells out the main aspects of psychoanalytic psychology. The simple and clear language characteristic of her lecturing, the precision of her concepts and their mutual relationships, and their liveliness of this comprehensive synthesis make for a thought provoking, exciting reading experience, even after forty years.'- Otto Kernberg'In the nine lectures we have the privileged opportunity of rediscovering Anna Freud. Though the lectures were given forty years ago they are fresh, original, playful and useful psychoanalytic verities. These classical jargon-free lectures have a breathtaking capacity to go from direct observation to theory-building propositions with a lucidity in which simplifying never becomes simplistic and which features in a dogma-free fashion the practical aspects of child development and child care.'- Albert J. Solnit M.D.'These nine lectures given by Anna Freud at Harvard University in 1952.vividly convey the spontaneity, clarity, and engaging quality of her didactic talks, prepared, if at all, only in her head. Forty years is a long time in psychoanalysis, but.they still provide, for the newcomer, a telling bird's eye view of the field, while the informed reader will recognize them as an important contribution to teaching technique in psychoanalysis.'- Clifford Yorke, F.R.C.P., D.P.M.Psychiatrist-in-Charge, The Anna Freud Centre, London

• Preface , Introduction , The unconscious , Ego and id , Sexuality and development , More on the id , Stages of development , Love, identification, and superego , Towards the Oedipus Complex , The ego’s anxiety and its effects , Prohibitions and permissiveness