Anna Freud
Children are People Too
Intro
Anna Freud contributed an understanding of children to psychoanalysis.1 Her father, Sigmund Freud, pioneered psychoanalysis: a set of therapeutic methods and techniques focused on subconscious thoughts, feelings, desires, and motivations. Anna built on and was inspired by her father’s work and legacy but did more than live in her father’s shadow.2
Anna is most well-known as the founder of child psychoanalysis, which applies the tenets of psychoanalysis to children aged 6 years old and up.3 While her father’s use of psychotherapy - the application of psychoanalytic concepts - worked to help adults reconstruct conceptualizations of their childhoods, Anna was expressly interested in helping children navigate their thoughts and feelings as they occurred.
Anna believed that every child should be recognized as a person in their own right, and explored this idea in her 1927 publication, Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis.1 She also expanded on her father’s work by identifying different types of defense mechanisms that we use to protect ourselves in her 1936 book, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.
Her work extending Sigmund’s psychoanalytic defense mechanisms and pioneering the subset of child psychoanalysis have contributed greatly to public understanding of child psychology. Child psychotherapy has since developed into a well-known therapeutic technique and Anna’s work has inspired important institutions such as the Anna Freud Centre in England, which provides mental health support and funding for children.4
I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence, but it comes from within. It is there all the time.
- Anna Freud
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
