Women & Queer Psychoanalysts, No. 8.
Anna Freud (1895–1982), psychoanalyst, co-founder of ego psychology and child psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud's youngest daughter.
In 1922, she presented her first paper to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society: "Beating Fantasies and Daydreams." The material came entirely from her father's psychoanalysis of her — the child being beaten in the fantasy was herself. Sigmund Freud sat in the audience. She used the language he taught her to narrate the secrets he had extracted from her.
She went on to write The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), the first systematic account of how the ego protects itself. During the war, she and Dorothy Burlingham opened wartime nurseries in London, taking in children bombed out of their homes by the Blitz. They lived together for fifty-four years.
During the same period, she lobbied the International Psychoanalytical Association to bar homosexuals from psychoanalytic training.
She spent her life studying defense mechanisms. The most thorough defense was against herself.