40 Fun Facts About Anna Freud

Money from which Hollywood star's estate reached Anna Freud's clinic through the star's New York analyst?

Marilyn Monroe left money to her New York analyst, Marianne Kris, to pass to a charity of Kris's choosing. Kris picked the children's clinic Anna Freud ran in London.

Which piece of consulting-room furniture did Anna Freud hardly ever use when she treated children?

The couch stayed empty because children cannot lie still and free-associate for long. Anna Freud let them roam the room, and if a child romped on the carpet she joined in.

Who took the 22-year-old Anna Freud into psychoanalysis as a patient in October 1918?

Her own father analysed her, in two stretches between 1918 and 1929. Sigmund Freud then used material from those sessions in one of his own papers.

Anna Freud's dog Wolf, which first turned Sigmund Freud into a dog lover in the 1920s, was which breed?

German Shepherd Wolf was meant as Anna's companion, but Sigmund grew so attached that she joked his affections had moved from her to the dog. He later kept Chow Chows of his own.

Which Nazi organisation took Anna Freud to its Vienna headquarters for questioning in March 1938?

The Gestapo questioned her about the International Psychoanalytical Association, then let her go home. Her arrest finally convinced Sigmund Freud that the family had to leave Vienna.

Aboard which famous train did Anna Freud and her parents leave Vienna for exile in June 1938?

The Orient Express carried the family out of Vienna on 4 June 1938 with a housekeeper and a doctor. Days later they reached London, where Anna Freud lived for the rest of her life.

What was Anna Freud's first profession, which she followed in Vienna for six years?

Schoolteacher was her trade from 1914 to 1920, at her own old school, the Cottage Lyceum. Her superior praised her gift for teaching, and by 1917 she was running a class of her own.

What did Anna Freud's London house at 20 Maresfield Gardens become in 1986, as she had wished?

A museum to Sigmund Freud opened in the house four years after her death. He had spent only his last year in it, while Anna Freud lived and worked there for more than four decades.

Anna Freud's lifelong companion was a granddaughter of the founder of which famous jewellery house?

Tiffany & Co. was founded by her grandfather Charles Lewis Tiffany. She left New York for Vienna in 1925 with her four children, hoping psychoanalysis could cure her son's skin complaint.

Which veteran actor plays Sigmund Freud in the 2023 film Freud's Last Session, which features Anna Freud?

Anthony Hopkins plays Sigmund in an imagined 1939 debate about God with the writer C. S. Lewis. The film also follows Anna Freud's devotion to him and her bond with her companion.

Where did Anna Freud come among the six children of Sigmund Freud and his wife?

The youngest of six, she grew up feeling left out by her five older siblings and turned to Sigmund for comfort. Later she became his nurse, secretary and spokesperson.

Anna Freud's nephew Lucian, son of her brother Ernst, won fame in Britain in which of the arts?

Painting made Lucian Freud one of the foremost English portraitists of the 20th century. His family had left Berlin for London in 1933, five years before his aunt Anna arrived.

Anna Freud nursed Sigmund Freud from 1923 through many operations for cancer in which part of the body?

The jaw cancer was diagnosed in 1923 and left him with a prosthesis that impaired his speech. Anna Freud became his nurse and spoke for him at congresses he could no longer attend.

Which 1938 event forced Anna Freud and her family to abandon Vienna, their home for decades?

The Anschluss, Nazi Germany's takeover of Austria, put the Jewish Freud family in danger overnight. Sigmund Freud had underestimated the threat and at first still meant to stay.

With what kind of marker did English Heritage honour Anna Freud at her Hampstead home in 2002?

A blue plaque marks 20 Maresfield Gardens, her home from 1938 until her death in 1982. She had arrived as a refugee and became a British subject in 1946.

At the London crematorium where Anna Freud's ashes lie, what unusual vessel holds the ashes of her parents?

An ancient Greek urn holds the ashes of Sigmund Freud and his wife, and hers were placed beside it. The spot is known as the Freud Corner, and her lifelong companion rests there too.

Caught in England when war broke out in 1914, the 18-year-old Anna Freud was officially classed as what?

An enemy alien under hastily imposed British rules, she was sent home with the Austro-Hungarian ambassador's party by way of Gibraltar and Genoa. She had gone to England to improve her English.

Which rival clashed with Anna Freud over how to analyse young children, splitting British psychoanalysts into camps?

Melanie Klein treated a small child's play as the equivalent of an adult's free association. Anna Freud rejected that, and their followers argued it out in a long series of wartime meetings in London.

Which later theorist of the identity crisis trained as a child analyst under Anna Freud in Vienna?

Erik Erikson joined the staff of the small Vienna school she helped found and went into a training analysis with her. He gained his diploma from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute in 1933.

Which defence mechanism did Anna Freud's 1936 book treat as the principal one, learned in early childhood?

Repression, she wrote, develops as a young child learns that acting on some impulses could be dangerous. Her book set out the mind's other defences alongside it, from projection to sublimation.

Which American mother of four, who moved to Vienna in 1925, became Anna Freud's lifelong companion?

Dorothy Burlingham brought her children to Vienna for analysis, and Anna Freud treated all four. She followed the Freuds to London and shared Anna's house there from 1940 until her death.

Anna Freud's 1936 book on the mind's defences became a founding work of which school of psychoanalytic thought?

Ego psychology shifted attention to the part of the mind that wards off painful ideas and feelings. The book established Anna Freud as a pioneering theorist in her own right.

Who was Anna Freud's mother, a Hamburg chief rabbi's granddaughter who married Sigmund Freud in 1886?

Martha Bernays ran an orderly household but was never close to Anna, who was nurtured instead by the family's Catholic nurse. Her sister Minna lived with the family too.

Which lung disease, caught near the end of the First World War, made Anna Freud give up her first job in 1920?

Tuberculosis struck her in 1918 and kept returning, so she resigned in 1920. By then she was already in analysis and translating papers for the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society.

Which future biographer of Sigmund Freud secured the permits that brought Anna Freud's family to Britain?

Ernest Jones, Welsh president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, flew to Vienna in March 1938 and then arranged the permits in London. Back in 1914 he had tried to court her.

Which princess supplied the money the Nazis demanded before Anna Freud and her parents could leave Austria?

Marie Bonaparte, a great-grandniece of Napoleon and a former patient of Sigmund Freud, made the funds available when he could not reach his own accounts. She had travelled to Vienna to help.

At which American university's law school did Anna Freud teach seminars on crime and the family?

Yale's law school seminars grew into Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, a 1973 book on children and the law that she wrote with two American colleagues.

Which hand craft did Anna Freud take up in later life, working through her lectures in her head as she went?

Weaving joined her lifelong knitting in 1955, when she bought two second-hand looms. She held that people who work with their minds need a craft for their hands, and sold her pieces to fund her clinic.

What term did Anna Freud use for a child's charted progress from dependency to emotional self-reliance?

Developmental lines let her staff compare one child's growth with the normal path and spot where it had stalled. She set the idea out in her 1965 book Normality and Pathology in Childhood.

Anna Freud's stormy childhood rivalry was with which older sibling, their mother's favourite, who married in 1913?

Sophie was seen as the beauty of the family and Anna as the brains, and they quarrelled constantly. The family even made sure Anna was away from Vienna for the wedding.

Which Russian-born writer, a friend of Nietzsche and Rilke, became Anna Freud's mentor in the early 1920s?

Lou Andreas-Salomé came to stay with the Freuds in 1921 and began long talks with her that carried on at Salomé's home in Germany. They gave Anna Freud confidence as both theorist and practitioner.

Where in America did Anna Freud receive her first honorary doctorate in 1950, at a campus Sigmund Freud visited in 1909?

Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, was where Sigmund Freud gave his only lectures in the United States. Her own honorary degrees then kept coming for thirty years.

The young camp survivors Anna Freud observed for 'An Experiment in Group Upbringing' had come from which Nazi camp?

Theresienstadt's child survivors reached Britain in 1945 and were cared for in a home run on the model of her wartime nurseries. Her 1951 paper on them became a landmark.

Which French thinker likened Anna Freud to a builder's plumb line, useful for gauging the vertical of a problem?

Jacques Lacan meant measured praise: a plumb line does not make a building, he said, but it shows what is truly upright. She had devoted her life to protecting Sigmund Freud's legacy.

What small household object gave its name to the progressive school Anna Freud helped found in Vienna in the 1920s?

A matchbox lent its name to the Matchbox School, built on the grounds of a friend's house in the Hietzing district and paid for by her companion. Most pupils were in analysis or had parents who were.

Which room of the family's London house did Anna Freud preserve as Sigmund Freud left it at his death in 1939?

His study, with its library and desk, was kept by her as it was for more than forty years. Even the pictures still hang where he arranged them.

Which British honour did Vienna-born Anna Freud receive in 1967, two decades after becoming a British subject?

A CBE, Commander of the Order of the British Empire, came in 1967. Honours piled up late in her life, and she joked that speeches about her achievements made her feel as if she were already dead.

Which activity did Anna Freud encourage in child sessions, treating the results as seriously as spoken words?

Drawing materials were always on hand in her treatment room, and she read the pictures as carefully as anything a child said. She once knitted clothes for a girl's doll to build trust.

In which city did Anna Freud and her parents break their 1938 journey into exile, as guests of a princess?

Paris was a one-day stop: they arrived on 5 June and travelled on overnight to London's Victoria station. Their hostess had helped pay their way out of Austria.

Which star of the TV series Babylon Berlin plays Anna Freud in the 2023 film Freud's Last Session?

Liv Lisa Fries, known as Charlotte Ritter in Babylon Berlin, plays her as a daughter bound closely to the dying Sigmund. The story is set two days after the Second World War began.