PSYCHOANALYSIS AFTER THE

FOUNDING : THE NEO-FREUDIANS

AND EGO PSYCHOLOGYANNA FREUD

Budak Belkom UMS 2014/2015

WHO IS ANNA

FREUD?

Anna Freud

Sigmund Freud

Anna Freud was the daughter of Sigmund Freud. She was influenced by her father's psychoanalytic theories, but her own contributions to ego psychology and child psychoanalysis made her an important theorist in her own right.

Leader of neo-Freudian Ego Psychology

• Was born on December 3, 1895 in Vienna, Austria

• The youngest of Sigmund Freud's six children

• The youngest child, extraordinary close to her father

• Not close to her mother, tense relationship with her five siblings

• In 1938 she moved to England to escape Nazi rule.

• She attended a private school, but later said she learned little at school. The majority of her education was from the teachings of her father's friends and associates.

• During WWII she studied the development of homeless children. She founded her own course in child psychoanalysis in 1947 and her own clinic in 1952.

CAREER• After high school, Anna Freud worked as an

elementary school teacher and began translating some of her father's works into German, increasing her interest in child psychology and psychoanalysis.

• While she was heavily influenced by her father's work, she was far from living in his shadow. Her own work expanded upon her father's ideas, but also created the field of child psychoanalysis.

• Although Anna Freud never earned a higher degree, her work in psychoanalysis and child psychology contributed to her eminence in the field of psychology.

• She began her children's psychoanalytic practice in 1923 in Vienna, Austria and later served as chair of the Vienna Psycho-Analytic Society. During her time in Vienna, she had a profound influence on Erik Erikson, who later went on to expand the field of psychoanalysis and ego psychology.

• In 1938, Anna was interrogated by the Gestapo and then fled to London along with her father.

• In 1941, she formed the Hampstead Nursery with Burlingham. The nursery served as a psychoanalytic program and home for homeless children.

The Neo-Freudians and Ego Psychology• Not all the theorists and practioners who followed Freud in the psychoanalytic

tradition felt the need to abandon or overthrow his system.• There reminded a sizable group of neo-Freudian analyst who adhered to the

central premises of psychoanalysis but nevertheless modified the system.• The major change these loyalists introduced was an expansion of the concept

of ego. Rather than being servant of the id, the ego was seen as having a more extensive role.

• Icluded the ideas-ego was more independent of the id, possesed its own energy not derived from the id, and had a functions separate from the id.

• Another change introduced was to place less emphasis on biological forces as influences on personality.

• They also minimized the importance of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex, suggesting thet personality development was determined primarily by psychological rather than psychosexual forces.

• Thus, social interactions in childhood assumed greater importance than real or imagined sexual interactions.

• Young Children in Wartime (1942).• Infants Without Families (1943)

• War and Children (1943)

After the Hampstead Nursery closed in 1945, Freud created the Hampstead Child Therapy

Course and Clinic and served as director from 1952 until her death in 1982.

Contributions to Psychology

Anna Freud created the field of child psychoanalysis and her work contributed greatly to our understanding of child psychology. She also developed different techniques to treat children. Freud noted that children’s symptoms differed from those of adults and were often related to developmental stages. She also provided clear explanations of the ego's defense mechanisms in her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936).

Child Psychoanalysis• But Anna Freud was not primarily a theoretician. Her interests were more

practical, and most of her energies were devoted to the analysis of children and adolescents, and to improving that analysis. Her father, after all, had focused entirely on adult patients. Although he wrote a great deal about development, it was from the perspectives of these adults. What do you do with the child, for whom family crises and traumas and fixations are present events, not dim recollections?

• First, the relationship of the child to the therapist is different. The child's parents are still very much a part of his or her life, a part the therapist cannot and should not try to usurp. But neither can the therapist pretend to be just another child rather than an authority figure. Anna Freud found that the best way to deal with this "transference problem" was the way that came most naturally: be a caring adult, not a new playmate, not a substitute parent. Her approach seems authoritarian by the standards of many modern child therapies, but it might make more sense.

• In 1927, Anna published Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis, which foretold the direction of her interests.

• Developed an approach to psychoanalytic theraphy with children that took into account their relative immaturity and the level of their verbal skills.

• Her innovations included the use of play materials and the observation of the child in the home setting. (most of the observation carried out in London)

• She opened a clinic next door to her father’s house and there established a treatment center and psychoanalytic training institute that attracted clinical psychologist from throughout the world. (The Anna Freud Centre in London continues her work today).

• Her studies were reported in annual voumes of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. (1945)

• Another problem with analyzing children is that their symbolic abilities are not as advanced as those of adults. The younger ones, certainly, may have trouble relating their emotional difficulties verbally. Even older children are less likely than adults to bury their problems under complex symbols. After all, the child's problems are here-and-now; there hasn't been much time to build up defenses. So the problems are close to the surface and tend to be expressed in more direct, less symbolic, behavioral and emotional terms.

• Most of her contributions to the study of personality come out of her work at the Hamstead Child Therapy Clinic in London, which she helped to set up. Here, she found that one of the biggest problems was communications among therapists: Whereas adult problems were communicated by means of traditional labels, children's problems could not be.

• Because children's problems are more immediate, she reconceptualized them in terms of the child's movement along a developmental time-line. A child keeping pace with most of his or her peers in terms of eating behaviors, personal hygiene, play styles, relationships with other children, and so on, could be considered healthy. When one aspect or another of a child's development seriously lagged behind the rest, the clinician could assume that there was a problem, and could communicate the problem by describing the particular lag.

WHAT IS DEFENSE MECHANISMS?

Defense Mechanisms

• The term 'defense' in relation to psychology was first used by Sigmund Freud in 1894. He meant it to describe, as Anna Freud says, “the ego's struggle against painful or unendurable ideas or effects” which may lead to neurosis.

• A defense is developed by the ego in order to protect itself against being overcome by unconscious demands like sex and aggression. The work of the psychoanalyst is to get a person to bring the instinctual urges into consciousness, which may involve isolating the original pain experienced when they were confronted by an impulse that was not satisfied.

• Freud notes that when a person succeeds in creating defense mechanisms against anxiety and pain, their ego has won the battle between the 'three institutions' of ego, id and superego.

• When a person has lost an internal battle to unconscious instinct, or societal 'musts' and 'shoulds', his or her ego has lost. The ego continually endeavors to create harmony between itself, the unconscious and the outside world, but this 'harmony' does not always lead to perfect mental health. In fact, sometimes when the ego 'wins', a person as a whole may have lost, since the win may involve the creation of a defense in order to have the ego maintain its sense of itself at all costs.

When people experience difficulties, they have different ways of handling their pain. These different ways of dealing with pain are called defense mechanisms. Originally conceived by Sigmund Freud, much of the development of defense mechanisms was done by his daughter, Anna Freud. Defense mechanisms can be healthy or unhealthy depending on the circumstances and how much a person uses them. If you slam down your briefcase because you are mad at your wife one time, that's not a big deal. But if you frequently take your anger out by throwing or breaking things, there might be a better way of dealing with your anger

Name of Defense Mechanism

Description Example

RepressionBurying a painful feeling or thought from your awareness though it may resurface in symbolic form. Sometimes considered a basis of other defense mechanisms.

You can't remember your father's funeral.

Denial Not accepting reality because it is too painful.You are arrested for drunk driving several times but don't believe you have a problem with alcohol.

RegressionReverting to an older, less mature way of handling stresses and feelings

You and your roommate have get into an argument so you stomp off into another room and pout

ProjectionAttributing your own unacceptable thoughts or feelings to someone or something else

You get really mad at your husband but scream that he's the one mad at you.

SplittingEverything in the world is seen as all good or all bad with nothing in between.

You think your best friend is absolutely worthless because he forgot a lunch date with you.

Isolation of affectAttempting to avoid a painful thought or feeling by objectifying and emotionally detaching oneself from the feeling

Acting aloof and indifferent toward someone when you really dislike that person

DisplacementChanneling a feeling or thought from its actual source to something or someone else.

When you get mad at your sister, you break your drinking glass by throwing it against the wall.

Reaction FormationAdopting beliefs, attitudes, and feelings contrary to what you really believe

When you say you're not angry when you really are.

RationalizationJustifying one's behaviors and motivations by substituting "good", acceptable reasons for these real motivations

I always study hard for tests and I know a lot of people who cheat so it's not a big deal I cheated this time.

Altruism Handling your own pain by helping others.After your wife dies, you keep yourself busy by volunteering at your church.

Humor Focusing on funny aspects of a painful situation.A person's treatment for cancer makes him lose his hair so he makes jokes about being bald.

SublimationRedirecting unacceptable, instinctual drives into personally and socially acceptable channels

Intense rage redirected in the form of participation in sports such as boxing or football

SuppressionThe effort to hide and control unacceptable thoughts or feelings

You are attracted to someone but say that you really don't like the person at all

UndoingTrying to reverse or "undo" a thought or feeling by performing an action that signifies an opposite feeling than your original thought or feeling

You have feelings of dislike for someone so you buy them a gift

EGO PSYCHOLOGY• Unlike Jung and Adler, she remained faithful to the basic ideas her father developed.

However, she was more interested in the dynamics of the psyche than in its structure, and was particularly fascinated by the place of the ego in all this. Freud had, after all, spent most of his efforts on the id and the unconscious side of psychic life. As she rightly pointed out, the ego is the "seat of observation" from which we observe the work of the id and the superego and the unconscious generally, and deserves study in its own right.

• She is probably best known for her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, in which she gives a particularly clear description of how the defenses work, including some special attention to adolescents' use of defenses. The defenses section of the chapter on Freud in this text is based as much on Anna's work as on Sigmund's.

• This focus on the ego began a movement in psychoanalytic circles called ego psychology that today represents, arguably, the majority of Freudians. It takes Freud's earlier work as a crucial foundation, but extends it into the more ordinary, practical, day-to-day world of the ego. In this way, Freudian theory can be applied, not only to psychopathology, but to social and developmental issues as well. Erik Erikson is the best-known example of an ego psychologist.

Research• She also influenced research in Freudian psychology. She standardized the

records for children with diagnostic profiles, encouraged the pooling of observations from multiple analysts, and encouraged long-term studies of development from early childhood through adolescence. She also led the way in the use of natural experiments, that is, careful analyses of groups of children who suffered from similar disabilities, such as blindness, or early traumas, such as wartime loss of parents. The common criticism of Freudian psychology as having no empirical basis is true only if "empirical basis" is restricted to laboratory experimentation!

• Most of Anna Freud's work is contained within The Writings of Anna Freud, a seven-volume collection of her books and papers, including The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense and her work on the analysis of children and adolescents. She is a very good writer, doesn't get too technical in most of her works, and uses many interesting case studies as examples.

COMMENT• Ego psychology-became primary American form

of psychoanalysis from the 1940s – early 1970s.• One goal of the neo-Freudians- make

psychoanalysis an accepted part of scientific psychology.

• In the process, the neo-Freudians fostered a more conciliatory relationship between psychoanalysis and academic experimental psychology.

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