Will the Developmental Line be Unbroken: The Anna Freud Tradition
This is one of our occasional book reviews of “orphaned” books: those that may be reviewed in a few years, but IP.net readers get a preview now.
The Anna Freud Tradition, edited by Marburg and Raphael-Leff, may be one in a series of Karnac books that look at various schools of psychoanalysis.
I’ve asked Nick Midgley of the Anna Freud Centre to write the review, despite
his having written one chapter in the book. Readers will judge how well he has presented an informed and thoughtful overview.
Anna Freud gave us much. Now, her students and colleagues summarize what paths she inititated and how it may be feasible to develop them further.
N. Szajnberg, M.D. Managing Editor
Review of ‘The Anna Freud Tradition: Lines of Development – Evolution of Theory and Practice over the Decades’, ed. N. Malberg and J. Raphael-Leff (Karnac, 2012).
Nick Midgley, PsyD. Course Director, MSc in Developmental Psychology and Clinical Practice, UCL / Anna Freud Centre.
In a book published in 1965, Normality and Pathology in Childhood, Anna Freud introduced her concept of ‘developmental lines’: expectable pathways based on subtle interactions of internal and external factors, through which we expect all children to pass. Although rooted in psychoanalytic thinking, the developmental lines drew on observations of surface behaviour, thus offering the possibility that analysts and non-analysts could find a shared language to assess the degree to which a child’s development was progressing, become uneven, or seriously derailed.
The editors of this new book (to which I contributed a chapter) draw on the metaphor of ‘developmental lines’ to describe the volume’s aims: to sketch out the ‘developmental line’ of the school of psychoanalytic thought associated with Anna Freud and the work of the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic in London (renamed, after her death, the Anna Freud Centre). In the thirty-seven chapters that make up this book, the editors promise to set out ‘the roots and branches of one extended family tree’. This image suggests an organic process of growth, a connectedness between the ideas as they have evolved in different domains.
The central idea – of both the book and of Anna Freud’s work – is the developmental perspective: the core of this book is two sections (made up of twenty-three chapters) on the applications of Anna Freud’s developmental thinking to clinical and outreach work with children. The book progress through the stages of development – from infancy through adolescence – not only summarizing Anna Freud’s key ideas, but also illustrating these ideas in practice. The editors hope that this extended section will become a ‘vibrant teaching and learning resource for students and practitioners …’, especially for those who hope to see how developmental theory translates into clinical practice with children of different ages. These chapters also offer a wonderful illustration of the interplay between theory, observation and clinical practice. They demonstrate how analytic ideas can contribute to work in a wide range of settings, including schools, hospitals and social care.
The sections that frame this core provide an historical context (in part one) and offer a range of personal and theoretical reflections on the Hampstead Clinic and the Anna Freudian tradition (in part four). Topics are wide-ranging, including the history of the Hampstead Clinic and its child analytic training course; the experience of being a trainee or receiving supervision there; as well as a series of ‘biographical cameos’ of significant figures in the history of the Clinic. Although these sections contain some excellent chapters, at times these parts felt more like the historical record of a significant moment in psychoanalytic history, recorded for posterity, and I was less clear who the intended readership was for these chapters.
Perhaps this brings us to the tension at the book’s heart: the image of a developmental line, or a tree and branches, suggests growth, progress, continuing evolution, but at various points, contributors speak of the ‘legacy’ of the Anna Freud approach, as if assessing the value of something that has already passed, a growth truncated. Several contributors comment on the decision to end the child analytic training in 2003, which means that no new child analysts are being trained at the Anna Freud Centre; this casts a long shadow over the volume. Will this decision to stop training child analysts at the Anna Freud Centre mean that the Anna Freudian approach will gradually fade, or is the legacy of the developmental approach to be found (and taken forward) in modern developments, such as developmental psychopathology and neuroscience (in the field of research) or parent-infant psychotherapy and mentalization-based treatment (as forms of therapy)?
These questions hover around the edges of this book, not quite addressed directly but inform many of the contributions. Is the Anna Freudian tradition still developing? Have some parts moved on while others are stuck, leading to uneven development? Has the whole development of this tradition been derailed? And if so, what are the chances of further development? These unanswered questions haunt the pages of this collection; they give it a curious tone – part celebration, part defiance, part mourning for something lost.
But these questions do not undermine this volume’s value. For those who have followed Anna Freud’s work for many years, this book is a marker of what has been achieved; for those new to Anna Freud, this book offers the opportunity to learn about her way of thinking, as described by several generations of child analysts who are themselves a part of ‘the Anna Freud tradition’.
Nick Midgley
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December 29th, 2012 at 3:09 pm
Nick Midgley, an emerging leader in the field, provides us, which to me sounds like a very bittersweet introduction to the legacy of the work of Anna Freud’s concept of developmental lines. I, who trained as a child psychiatrist in the early 1970s and as a child analyst in the late 70s, the organization of Anna Freud’s developmental lines never struck a useful chord for me because of, even then, an antiquated vocabulary. To me the central theorist was Berta Bornstein, herself a junior colleague of AF, and the concept of interpreting defenses against painful affects.
Learning cognitive and developmental psychology and more recently developmental neuroscience has been a much more productive exercise. I think the conception of analytic developmental lines may have emerged in an atmosphere where psychoanalysts, spurred by the work of, especially, H Hartmann, tried to expand the scope of psychoanalysis to include it as a general psychology.
To me the unintended consequence of that endeavor was to distance psychoanalytic ideas from mainstream science and mainstream mental health treatment. A more narrow focus for psychoanalysis, such as focusing on meaning, conflict and defense, repetition and influence of the past on the present, and the power of unconscious mental activity and fantasy, can help reintegrate psychoanalytic ideas with other sciences and other practitioners.
Such a narrower focus, perhaps, can also provide the rationale for the value of intensive treatment, which can then be systematically studied.
December 31st, 2012 at 6:28 am
Despite the use of the trope of developmental lines in conceptualizing the volume on the Anna Freud Tradition (to which Jack and I also contributed a chapter of reminiscence), the contents illustrate far more of her contributions than developmental lines. To me, Anna Freud’s example and contribution was to insist on the multi-dimensionality of psychoanalysis, as she called metapsychology the “language of psychoanalysis.” Unlike Leon, I see our strength residing in the capacity of analysis as a general psychology, with application to normal and pathological functioning and development, in many contexts.
December 31st, 2012 at 2:24 pm
I want to thank both Dr. Hoffman and Kerry Kelly Novick for taking the time to post a comment. All the more so when they both highlight the importance of promoting child psychoanalysis as an integrative field that moves away from the traditionally insular attitude that, in my humble opinion, has tended to permeate the psychoanalytic sphere.
The book Dr. Joan Raphael-Leff and I edited reflects on the main contribution of Anna Freud and others who, working from the developmental perspective, strived to make child psychoanalytic ideas accessible and inviting to parents, teachers, medical staff, and other professionals inhabiting the world of the child. The book was inspired by our wish to highlight how the developmental tradition has followed its own “developmental line” beginning with ideas on ego psychology but extended to innovative ways of thinking about psychopathology from a developmental perspective. Covering this evolution, we also include contemporary ideas such as the concept of mentalization, which integrates traditional and contemporary ideas, both psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic in nature. We think the works collectively show that Anna Freud’s deceitfully simple ideas have survived the test of time and remain as relevant and able to be integrated into multiple contexts.
An aspect of Anna Freud’s relevance that is near to my heart as a practitioner in both private and community settings, is her contribution to those of us attempting to communicate the value of child analysis to parents, teachers, doctors and lawyers. The metapsychological framework elegantly presented on Anna Freud’s diagnostic profile provides a language that is accessible and can be used creatively, allowing us to remain firmly positioned in our clinical formulations and interventions while working in a variety of settings (as reflected in the multiple clinical papers written by the last generations of Anna Freudians). As someone who teaches the lines to social workers, teachers and uses them in the context of her consulting room to explain to parents what is going on in their child’s internal world in the midst of pressure from insurance companies and medications given to four year olds, I must say, I find an oasis in the sturdiness of those “old fashioned” ideas.
To close, in our book we used the concept of the developmental lines as a metaphor to indicate the back and forth movement of our field. In the spirit of the developmental line, we depict the need for integration and flexibility but underscore as well that this does not mean abandoning, as Dr. Hoffman rightly implies, the importance of the internal experience. I invite the clinical reader to open our book and accompany us on the journey of growth and development of this tradition. You might find, perhaps to your surprise, the integration of many theoretical voices and disciplines in the clinical writing of contemporary Anna Freudians.
December 31st, 2012 at 8:46 pm
The four comments above reach a respectful level of dialogue necessary for a vibrant field, especially one that is as small as the community of those who work with children. Dr. Malberg points out correctly that capturing the inner life of the child (such as meaning, conflict and defense, as Dr. Hoffman emphasizes) is a significant component in good clinical work. Of course, when Anna Freud opened her Clinic to surviving children of Theresienstadt or London children undergoing Nazi V-bombs, she Janus-faced had to listen both to the child’s understanding of their experiences and to the nature of the experiences themselves. It was experiences such as these, and in that same era, that Bowlby turned to study the maternal-infant interaction and developed his concepts of attachment, separation and loss. While he was marginalized in London, his ideas have had profound traction. Respecting the nature of the attachment relationship, means also learning about the child’s working model of attachment and all its associated fantasies, defenses and anxieties.
Bravo to Hoffman, Novick, Malberg and to Nick Midgley for sparking this dialogue.
January 2nd, 2013 at 4:59 am
And bravo to nathan Szajnberg for initiating this publication
January 5th, 2013 at 8:15 am
The various stimulating posts, led me to think: How do analysts go about trying to integrate new knowledge? I came across the following: Freud, A. (1966). A Short History of Child Analysis. Psychoanal. St. Child, 21:7-14, which was based on a talk by her at the first meeting of the Association of Child Psychoanalysis in 1966. She concludes this short article by noting the lack of institutional support for research in the analytic field, which, unfortunately, we still need to redress.
“Psychoanalytic Research
In line with the developments in adult analysis, and as Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, and their followers had done from the outset, our child analysts also extended their interest gradually from abnormal to normal psychology. In our case this meant the move from a theory of childhood pathology to the recognition of a hypothetical norm in the processes of mental growth, and from there to the construction of a developmental metapsychology. With this new “widening of the scope,” new tasks opened up for us and new responsibilities developed.
It is a basic fact for all analysts that the same technique serves both analytic therapy and analytic exploration. Nevertheless, the official psychoanalytic Institutes, following the tradition in which they were set up initially, train carefully in its former use and in comparison neglect the latter. Thus, candidates are guided how to extract the maximum information from transference, resistance, dreams, other id derivatives, or ego mechanisms; how to time their interpretations; in short, how to cure their patients. They receive no guidance in such important matters as how to record their material, or sift and summarize it, or verify their findings, or pool them with others; how to trace the history of psychoanalytic concepts, to inquire into their definitions and to clarify and unify their technical terms;
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how to select specific area for their research interests or to become alerted to the gaps in our knowledge. Not that these latter activities are not pursued abundantly in the analytic community, as evidenced by the analytic journals and book publications. But they are left more or less completely to individual effort and individual ingenuity, or at best to postgraduate opportunities which exist in some localities and are lacking in others.
In fact, it was the wish to provide such missing facilities which led to the building up of the departments of the Hampstead Course and Clinic. At least so far as child analysis is concerned, the various facets of psychoanalysis are treated there as if they were on a par, and students are from the beginning of their training systematically introduced to psychoanalysis as a method of treatment; as a tool to use for exploration and study; as a theory in need of scrutiny and expansion; as a body of knowledge capable of application to a wide number of needs in the community. What is left to the individual candidate is the final selection of one or more of these part aspects of psychoanalysis for his future career.
I would like to think that this new Association, on the occasion of its first convention, is committing itself to a similar wide outlook on the subject and thereby will shape the future of child analysis in the United States so far as analytic child therapy, analytic child psychology, analytic child study, and analytic child services are concerned.”
January 6th, 2013 at 8:53 pm
Leon,
This sounds like something that the ACP could reinvigorate: systematic research. Good clinical and developmental studies might not only enlighten us and strengthen the field, but also soften the divide that theoretical ardor induces. I think it was Charcot who told Freud that theory is fine, but should not interfere with the facts. I am thinking of Fonagy and Target’s careful retrospective study of outcome in child analysis at the Hampsted, for instance.