Arrival at 20 Maresfield Gardens
On 6 June 1938, Sigmund Freud, his wife Martha, and their youngest daughter Anna arrived at 39 Elsworthy Road, Hampstead, having fled Vienna following the Nazi annexation of Austria in March of that year. The family had escaped only with great difficulty: it required the personal intervention of Princess Marie Bonaparte, Ernest Jones, and the American chargé d'affaires in Vienna, along with the payment of a punitive "flight tax" to the Nazi authorities, to secure their departure. Four of Sigmund's sisters — Rosa, Marie, Adolfine, and Pauline — were unable to leave and would perish in the concentration camps.
The Elsworthy Road house was a temporary arrangement. By September 1938, the family had moved to 20 Maresfield Gardens, a substantial red-brick house built in the Queen Anne Revival style that would become their permanent home. Sigmund Freud had barely a year to live — he was suffering from the oral cancer that had plagued him since 1923, and he died at Maresfield Gardens on 23 September 1939, three weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War. His physician, Max Schur, administered a fatal dose of morphine at Freud's request, ending sixteen years of suffering.
For Anna Freud, the death of her father was both a devastating personal loss and, paradoxically, a liberation. She had been his closest companion, his intellectual heir, and his most devoted carer for two decades. She had nursed him through thirty-three operations on his jaw and palate. She had served as his representative at international conferences, his correspondent with the wider psychoanalytic movement, and increasingly, his voice to the outside world. Now, at the age of forty-three, she was alone in a foreign country, in a house that still smelled of her father's cigars, with a war beginning outside. What she did next would establish her as one of the most important psychologists of the twentieth century and would transform Hampstead into the world capital of child psychoanalysis.
The Hampstead War Nurseries
The Second World War provided Anna Freud with an extraordinary, if terrible, natural experiment. The mass evacuation of children from London, which began on 1 September 1939 — the very day Germany invaded Poland — separated hundreds of thousands of children from their parents. The Blitz, which began in September 1940, created further disruption: families were bombed out of their homes, parents were killed or injured, and children were left in states of shock, grief, and bewilderment that the existing child welfare system was wholly unequipped to address.
Anna Freud's response was to establish the Hampstead War Nurseries, which operated from 1940 to 1945 under the auspices of the Foster Parents' Plan for War Children, an American charitable organisation. The nurseries occupied two houses in Hampstead: Wedderburn Road and Netherhall Gardens. They took in children from bombed areas of London — infants, toddlers, and young children up to the age of about six — and provided them with residential care in conditions that were deliberately designed to replicate, as closely as possible, the emotional environment of a family home.
What made the War Nurseries revolutionary was not the care itself — there were many wartime nurseries in London — but the systematic observation and recording that Anna Freud and her colleague Dorothy Burlingham carried out. Every child's behaviour was observed and documented in meticulous detail. Emotional reactions to separation from parents, responses to bombing and air raids, patterns of attachment and detachment, the development (or failure) of social relationships between the children — all of this was recorded, analysed, and published. The resulting reports, collected as Infants Without Families (1944) and War and Children (1943), constituted the most detailed observational study of children under extreme stress that had ever been undertaken.
The findings were groundbreaking. Anna Freud demonstrated that the psychological damage inflicted on children by separation from their mothers was, in many cases, more severe than the effects of bombing itself. Children who remained with their parents in London, enduring air raids and the destruction of their homes, generally fared better psychologically than children who had been evacuated to safe areas but separated from their families. This finding contradicted the prevailing assumption that physical safety was paramount, and it had profound implications for child welfare policy — implications that would not be fully absorbed by the British establishment for decades.
The War Nurseries also provided a training ground for a generation of child analysts and child care workers. The staff included both qualified psychoanalysts and younger women who were being trained in Anna Freud's methods. The combination of residential care, systematic observation, and psychoanalytic interpretation created an environment that was simultaneously a nursery, a research institute, and a training school. This integration of practice, research, and education would become the hallmark of Anna Freud's institutional legacy in Hampstead.
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence
Anna Freud's theoretical contributions to psychoanalysis centred on the concept of the ego — the part of the personality that mediates between the instinctual drives of the id, the moral demands of the superego, and the constraints of external reality. Her most important single work, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, was published in German in 1936, two years before the family's flight from Vienna, and appeared in English translation in 1937. It remains one of the foundational texts of ego psychology and one of the most widely read works in the psychoanalytic literature.
The book's central argument was that the ego employs a repertoire of unconscious strategies — defence mechanisms — to manage anxiety arising from conflicts between the id, the superego, and reality. Anna Freud identified and systematised ten principal mechanisms of defence: repression, regression, reaction formation, isolation, undoing, projection, introjection, turning against the self, reversal, and sublimation. Some of these had been described by her father in scattered references throughout his work; Anna Freud's achievement was to bring them together into a coherent theoretical framework and to demonstrate their clinical significance through detailed case material.
The book was also, implicitly, a statement of intellectual independence. By focusing on the ego rather than the id, Anna Freud was signalling a shift of emphasis within psychoanalytic theory — away from the archaeology of unconscious fantasy that had dominated her father's work and towards the adaptive, reality-oriented functions of the personality. This shift would have enormous consequences. Ego psychology, as it came to be called, became the dominant school of psychoanalysis in the United States from the 1940s through the 1970s, and Anna Freud's work was its foundational text. Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and Rudolph Loewenstein — the so-called "ego psychology troika" who shaped American psychoanalysis — all acknowledged their debt to Anna Freud's pioneering formulations.
The Anna Freud Centre and the Hampstead Child Therapy Course
In 1947, Anna Freud established the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic at 21 Maresfield Gardens, adjacent to the family home. The institution — which would later be renamed the Anna Freud Centre and is now known as the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families — was the most important legacy of Anna Freud's work in Hampstead and remains one of the world's leading centres for child mental health research and practice.
The Hampstead Child Therapy Course was, in its original conception, a training programme for child psychoanalysts. It offered a rigorous curriculum that combined theoretical instruction in psychoanalytic theory with extensive supervised clinical work with children. The course typically lasted four years and required trainees to undergo their own personal analysis — a requirement that Anna Freud regarded as non-negotiable. Graduates of the course went on to practise throughout the world, and the Hampstead training was regarded within the psychoanalytic profession as the gold standard for child analytic education.
The clinic attached to the course provided treatment for children and families from across London. It was not a private institution serving the wealthy residents of Hampstead; it was a service that drew its patients from all social classes and all areas of the city. Children were referred by schools, by general practitioners, by hospitals, and by child welfare agencies. The conditions treated ranged from anxiety and depression to severe behavioural disturbance, developmental delay, and the psychological consequences of abuse and neglect. The clinic operated on a sliding scale of fees, and many families paid nothing at all.
What distinguished the Hampstead Clinic from other child guidance centres was the integration of treatment with research. Anna Freud insisted that every case seen at the clinic should contribute to the broader understanding of child development. She developed the Hampstead Index — a vast card-filing system that cross-referenced clinical material from hundreds of cases, allowing researchers to track themes, symptoms, and developmental patterns across the entire clinical population. The Index was a pre-digital database of extraordinary ambition, and it generated a body of research that influenced child psychology worldwide.
The clinic also pioneered what Anna Freud called "developmental lines" — a framework for understanding child development that traced the child's progress along multiple dimensions simultaneously. Rather than viewing development as a single linear progression, Anna Freud proposed that children develop along several parallel lines — from dependency to emotional self-reliance, from play to work, from egocentricity to companionship, from irresponsibility to responsibility for one's own body — and that the clinician's task was to assess the child's position on each of these lines. This multidimensional model of development was a significant advance on the stage theories that had previously dominated the field, and it remains influential in contemporary developmental psychology.
The Dispute with Melanie Klein
No account of Anna Freud's career in Hampstead can avoid the great intellectual war that dominated British psychoanalysis from the 1940s through the 1960s: the dispute between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Klein, a Viennese-born analyst who had settled in London in 1926, had developed a radically different approach to child analysis, and the conflict between the two women was one of the most bitter and consequential in the history of the psychological sciences.
The disagreements were both technical and theoretical. Anna Freud believed that child analysis required a preliminary phase in which the analyst established a positive relationship with the child before interpretation could begin. She argued that children's egos were insufficiently developed to tolerate the direct interpretation of unconscious material, and that the analyst must function partly as an educator and partly as an ally of the child's developing ego. Klein, by contrast, held that children could be analysed from the very beginning of treatment using the same interpretive techniques that were applied to adults, with play substituting for free association. Klein interpreted children's play in terms of unconscious phantasy from the first session, offering interpretations of extraordinary depth and specificity to children as young as two.
The theoretical stakes were immense. Klein's work implied that the earliest months of life were dominated by intense unconscious phantasies of a violent and sexual character — phantasies that Klein described in language of startling vividness. Her concepts of the "paranoid-schizoid position" and the "depressive position" posited that infants experienced states of mind that were, in essence, psychotic — characterised by splitting, projection, and persecutory anxiety — before achieving a more integrated relationship with reality. Anna Freud found these ideas clinically unsubstantiated and theoretically extravagant. She insisted on the primacy of direct observation over speculative reconstruction, and she regarded Klein's interpretations as imposing adult categories on infant experience in a way that was scientifically unjustifiable.
The dispute came to a head in the "Controversial Discussions" held at the British Psycho-Analytical Society between 1941 and 1945. These were a series of formal scientific meetings at which the theoretical differences between the two camps were debated with an intensity and rancour that shocked even seasoned participants. The eventual resolution was a compromise: the British Society was divided into three groups — the "A Group" (Kleinians), the "B Group" (Anna Freudians), and the "Middle Group" or "Independents" — each with its own training arrangements. This tripartite structure persisted for decades and gave British psychoanalysis its distinctive pluralist character.
Anna Freud's response to the institutional deadlock within the British Society was, characteristically, to build her own institution. The Hampstead Clinic became, in effect, the headquarters of the Anna Freud school — a parallel centre of training, research, and clinical practice that operated independently of the British Society while maintaining formal links with it. From Maresfield Gardens, Anna Freud directed an international network of colleagues, students, and admirers, and the Hampstead Clinic's publications — particularly The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, the annual volume that she co-edited from 1945 — carried her theoretical perspectives to a worldwide audience.
Life at 20 Maresfield Gardens
Anna Freud lived at 20 Maresfield Gardens from 1938 until her death on 9 October 1982, a span of forty-four years. The house became inseparable from her identity and from the psychoanalytic tradition she represented. Sigmund Freud's study, preserved exactly as he had left it — with the famous couch, the collection of antiquities, the bookshelves, and the desk — occupied the ground floor. Anna Freud's own consulting room and living quarters were upstairs. The proximity of the father's study and the daughter's workplace created a domestic arrangement that was, in its way, a spatial metaphor for their intellectual relationship: continuity and development, fidelity and independence, the past and the future, all housed under a single roof.
The house was also a social centre. Anna Freud was a gracious if somewhat formal hostess, and Maresfield Gardens was a place where analysts, researchers, and students from around the world came to pay their respects, to present their work, and to seek the approval — or endure the criticism — of the most formidable woman in psychoanalysis. The Wednesday evening seminars, held in the drawing room at Maresfield Gardens, were legendary occasions at which Anna Freud would listen to clinical presentations with intense concentration and then offer comments of devastating precision. Her manner was kind but her standards were exacting, and those who presented at the Wednesday seminars knew that they were submitting their work to the most rigorous scrutiny available in the profession.
Anna Freud's domestic life was shared with Dorothy Burlingham, an American heiress and psychoanalyst who had been her companion since 1925. Burlingham, the daughter of Louis Comfort Tiffany, had come to Vienna to have her children analysed by Anna Freud and had remained, becoming first a patient, then a colleague, and finally a lifelong partner. The nature of their relationship has been the subject of much speculation; what is beyond dispute is that they lived together for over fifty years, raised Burlingham's children together, collaborated professionally, and were, in every meaningful sense, a family. Burlingham died at Maresfield Gardens in 1979, three years before Anna Freud.
After Anna Freud's death in 1982, 20 Maresfield Gardens was opened to the public as the Freud Museum. The museum preserves Sigmund Freud's study and library, Anna Freud's rooms, and a substantial archive of family papers, photographs, and correspondence. It has become one of Hampstead's most visited cultural attractions, drawing scholars, students, and curious members of the public from around the world. The museum's programme of exhibitions, lectures, and educational events ensures that the intellectual legacy of both Freuds remains a living presence in NW3.
Legacy in NW3 and Beyond
Anna Freud's legacy in Hampstead extends far beyond the museum and the clinic that bear the family name. She transformed the way that Western societies think about children — about their inner lives, their emotional needs, and the obligations that adults owe them. Before Anna Freud, children's psychology was largely understood in terms of behaviour and cognition; after Anna Freud, it was impossible to discuss child development without acknowledging the role of unconscious emotion, of fantasy, of the complex internal dramas that children enact in their play and their relationships.
The Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families, which grew out of the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic, is now one of the largest and most influential child mental health organisations in the United Kingdom. It operates from premises in Kangaroo Court, near King's Cross — a considerable distance from its Hampstead origins — but its intellectual heritage remains rooted in the work that Anna Freud carried out in NW3 between 1938 and 1982. The centre's research programmes, its clinical services, its training courses, and its policy advocacy all derive from the tradition of rigorous observation and psychoanalytic understanding that Anna Freud established at Maresfield Gardens.
In a broader sense, Anna Freud's legacy can be traced in the transformation of attitudes towards children that has occurred in Western societies since the mid-twentieth century. The recognition that children have emotional needs that are as important as their physical needs; the understanding that separation from attachment figures causes genuine psychological harm; the principle that the "best interests of the child" should be paramount in legal proceedings — these ideas, which are now so widely accepted as to seem self-evident, were radical when Anna Freud first articulated them. Her influence on the Children Act 1989, which reformed child protection law in England and Wales, was indirect but substantial: the Act's emphasis on the welfare of the child as the paramount consideration reflects principles that Anna Freud had been advocating for decades.
Hampstead itself was shaped by Anna Freud's presence in ways that extended beyond the institutional. The concentration of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in NW3 — which has been a standing joke among Londoners for generations — owes something to the gravitational pull of Maresfield Gardens. Analysts trained at the Hampstead Clinic set up practices in the surrounding streets; their patients, in turn, sometimes became analysts themselves. The density of brass nameplates on the doors of houses in Fitzjohn's Avenue, Netherhall Gardens, and the streets around Swiss Cottage is a visible manifestation of the psychoanalytic culture that Anna Freud's presence helped to create.
Anna Freud received the CBE in 1967 and was made an honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Yale University, where she lectured regularly from the 1960s, awarded her an honorary doctorate. She received similar honours from institutions in Vienna, Frankfurt, and elsewhere. But perhaps the most fitting tribute to her work is the one that requires no plaque, no certificate, and no ceremony: the fact that millions of children around the world have received better care, more sensitive treatment, and a greater measure of understanding because of the insights that one woman developed in a red-brick house on a quiet Hampstead street.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London's most remarkable neighbourhoods.*