Anna Freud: The Hampstead War Nurseries and the role of the direct observation of children for psychoanalysis

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introduced ‘very many disturbing and complicating elements into nursery life’ 

(A. Freud and Burlingham, 1944, p. 590). ‘Jim’, for example, would burst into 

tears every time his own nurse left the room. At 17 months he was clinging, 

possessive and unwilling to be left alone for a minute by his nurse-mother, and 

in her absence would frequently lie on the fl oor sobbing in despair (p. 592). 

Moreover, the introduction of such artifi cial families raised the possibility of 

further separations and losses, as certain staff members left the Nurseries due to 

unforeseen circumstances. ‘Reggie’, at 2 years and 8 months, became lost and 

desperate after the departure of the woman who had nursed him since the age of 

5 months, and refused to look at her when she came to visit two weeks later. That 

night, in bed, he sat up and said, ‘My very own Mary-Ann! But I don’t like her’ 

(1944, p. 596).

Figure 6

© Anna Freud Centre, reproduced with permission

Anna Freud recognized that such powerful emotional reactions on the part of 

children to their attachment fi gures was often used as an argument against family 

arrangements in the nursery. But she argued powerfully for the benefi ts—indeed the 

necessity—of such an arrangement:

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When choosing between the two evils of broken and interrupted attachments and an existence 

of emotional barrenness, the latter is the more harmful solution because … it offers less 

prospect for normal character development … In reality, it is not the absence of irrational 

emotional attachments which helps a child to grow up normally, but the painful and often 

disturbing process of learning how to deal with such emotions. (pp. 596, 594)

But it was not simply in relation to mothers that Anna Freud was aware of the 

impact of broken attachments. While recognizing that the separation from fathers 

did not have the same immediate impact on children, the absence of father-fi gures 

in the residential nursery setting was even more striking than the absence of mother-

fi gures, and observations made at the time traced the impact of this absence on the 

development of identifi cations, superego development and object relations among 

the children in her care (Hellman, 1990, p. 27). Young children often maintained 

powerful representations of their fathers, often based on the most fl eeting  of 

contacts. Tony, aged 4, would mention his absent father’s name continuously in 

every conversation:

When he picked blackberries, fl owers, leaves, he wanted to keep them all safe for his father. 

When a child fell down and cried, he would say (referring to an accident of his father’s): ‘My 

daddy did not cry when he fell out of the army lorry, did he?’ When he saw a child run, he would 

automatically say: ‘My daddy can run much faster’ … He would eat greens though he disliked 

them, so as to ‘get strong like my daddy’ … Whatever deed of omnipotence the other children 

ascribed to God, Tony ascribed to his father. (A. Freud and Burlingham, 1944, p. 644)

Anna Freud maintained an enormous correspondence with fathers serving overseas 

and did everything she could to encourage them to maintain contact with their 

children in the Nurseries (see Figure 7) and visit whenever it was possible (Young-

Bruehl, 1991, p. 250); but she also decided that male fi gures were vitally important in 

the children’s lives, so she invited six young men—all conscientious objectors who 

had refused to fi ght in the war—to come and work in the War Nurseries, undertaking 

maintenance and gardening while also playing a role in the children’s lives.

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The importance of these arrangements—but also the lasting impact of the absent 

father—could be seen in the case of ‘Martin’, who joined the Nurseries at 16 months 

of age, having been separated from his mother at the age of 4 months and placed in 

a very unsatisfactory foster-home (Hellman, 1990, p. 32). Martin was illegitimate 

and had never known his natural father, but as he reached his fourth birthday he 

became very fond of one of the male workers in the Nursery, who he would often 

imitate. Martin would walk around wearing a cap or a helmet, speak in a deep voice 

and refer to himself as ‘Big Bill’, a worker in the Nurseries who was immensely 

powerful. Martin appeared to be using this man as a fi gure of identifi cation to help 

consolidate his own masculine identity. However, it was noted that—unlike other 

fatherless children in the Nurseries—Martin never made any reference to his real 

father, or asked questions about him.

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One of these men, James Robertson, acted as the Chief Social Worker to the Nursery, and went on 

in the post-war years to make a series of observational fi lms highlighting the impact of separation on 

young children’s lives. These fi lms had a huge impact on public policy in the UK, especially regarding 

the way hospitals and nurseries considered visiting rights for parents of children in hospital or in care.

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Figure 7

© Plan (formerly Foster Parents Plan), reproduced with permission

Anna Freud and her co-workers noted that, where children were growing up 

without a father, they often created ‘fantasy’ fathers who in their imagination were 

both fantastically good or terribly evil and violent. In Martin’s case, the elaboration 

of such fantasies only became apparent when, after the war had ended, aged 9, he was 

referred for psychoanalytic treatment at the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic (now 

the Anna Freud Centre), because of an eating disturbance, anti-social behaviour and 

an inhibition in his learning which meant that he had hardly learned to read or write 

(p. 50). Martin soon let his analyst know that he found it diffi cult to concentrate in 

school because he was so preoccupied with his day-dreams: ‘there are so many, it 

will take a whole year’, he told her. The profusion of fantasy material that Martin 

went on to elaborate, much of it related to his absent father, was in striking contrast 

to the lack of verbalized fantasy observed in his earlier childhood, which could only 

now be understood as a reaction against the intensity and terrifying nature of these 

thoughts. 

In a series of fantasies about dead men, ghosts and corpses, Martin expressed 

his feelings about his unknown father, as well as very primitive anxieties about 

his mother’s sexuality. It emerged that Martin believed all the children in the War 

Nursery had really been his brothers and sisters, but also that he himself was both his 

mother’s husband and his own father, dramatizing in the sessions his own ‘pushing 

and shoving to get out of the womb’—a womb which he had himself impregnated 

(p. 46).

There isn’t space to give an account of the whole development of the father-

theme over the course of Martin’s analysis, or the way in which simultaneous 

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