Austrian-British psychoanalyst, youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud and the founder of child psychoanalysis in its ego-psychological form — the long-running alternative to Melanie Klein's object-relations approach. She was her father's caretaker in his final illness, emigrated with him to London in 1938 to escape the Nazi occupation of Austria, and after his death the next year became the principal custodian and continuator of the orthodox line of psychoanalytic theory.
Her The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936) is the central theoretical text of ego psychology. Where Sigmund Freud had treated the ego largely as the site of repression, Anna Freud catalogued a much wider set of defensive operations — projection, reaction formation, regression, isolation, undoing, turning against the self, identification with the aggressor, and others — and treated the ego's defensive work as itself a proper object of analytic attention. This reframing made the ego, and not only the unconscious, into territory the analyst needed to understand, and it provided the theoretical foundation on which Heinz Hartmann, David Rapaport, and Erik Erikson built the distinctively American ego psychology of the 1940s and 1950s.
Her second great subject was childhood. With Dorothy Burlingham she ran the Hampstead War Nurseries during the Blitz, and the observational studies that came out of that work — on children separated from their families, on the effects of institutional care, on normal and disturbed development — grounded her later Normality and Pathology in Childhood (1965) and the developmental-lines framework it introduced. Her clinical disagreement with Klein — over whether very young children could be analyzed on the adult model, over the timing of the super-ego, over the nature of early phantasy — was carried out most formally in the Controversial Discussions of the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1941–1945 and structured the Society's tripartite division thereafter.
Late in life she collaborated with the American lawyers Joseph Goldstein and Albert Solnit on Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973), a short and influential argument that custody and placement decisions should be governed by the child's need for a continuous, stable "psychological parent." The book shaped American and British family law for a generation.
Anna Freud is in the graph because her extension of psychoanalysis to the study of children and to ego defenses became the practical form in which psychoanalytic ideas entered twentieth-century education, child welfare, and the moral imagination of family life.