Member-only story
A Brief Review of Anna Freud’s Concept of Altruistic Surrender
Giving until it hurts may seem virtuous, but it may be a manifestation of defense mechanisms erected in response to covert, overly harsh self-criticism.
Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud’s youngest child, became a formidable force within psychoanalysis, focusing on child psychology. Initially a teacher, she switched to an earlier interest, psychoanalysis, while recovering from tuberculosis. After Gestapo interrogation in the late 1930s, she convinced her father to flee to England. There, she pursued child psychoanalysis, opening the Hampstead War Nurseries in 1941 for children displaced by World War II, and in 1959, the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic, later renamed the Anna Freud Center.
Her extensive publications covered children and war, ego function, and childhood and adolescent development, both normal and pathological. In the foreword of her significant work The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936) [1], she wrote:
“[T]his book deals exclusively with one particular problem, i.e. with the ways and means by which the ego wards off unpleasure and anxiety, and exercises control over impulsive behaviors, affects, and instinctive urges.” [2]
