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All registrants will receive their link to join via ZOOM. Course material will be sent 1 day before the event. Time includes a tea break. All attendees will also receive access to the recording, available to watch back for 1 month.
Anna Freud was a pioneer in the application of the principles of psychoanalysis to children’s education and welfare, and later the founder of the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic (renamed the Anna Freud Centre following her death). We will examine her turbulent relationship with her father, her personal psychoanalysis with him, and the writings which established her own lasting place in the history of psychoanalysis. We will also explore the legacy of her work with children, which continues to this day.
Melanie Klein was also a pioneer of child psychoanalysis whose radically different way of working with children brought her into sharp conflict with Anna Freud, so that they became professional rivals from the 1920’s onwards. Ultimately Klein’s new insights into infancy and childhood, derived from her work with her young patients (as well as with adults), led her to create a powerful new version of psychoanalytic theory that took psychoanalysis beyond Freud, marking the beginning of the Object Relations school. Anna Freud’s strong opposition to Klein’s new version of psychoanalysis was formally expressed in the ‘Controversial Discussions’ between her followers and those of Klein, which took place in London in the 1940’s, after the Freud family relocated there from Vienna.
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SCHEDULE
Thursday 1 February 1:30 pm – 5.00 pm
Session 1: We will review Anna Freud’s personal analysis with her father, and her participation in the experimental school movement in the context of ‘Red Vienna’ in the 1920’s and 30’s. This will lead to an examination of her early psychoanalytic work with children, culminating in the setting up of the ‘Hampstead War Nurseries’ in London during WW2.
Session 2: We will examine Melanie Klein’s early work with children, which led to the formulation of the psychoanalytic play technique, and thus to an approach to working psychoanalytically with children that was in sharp contrast to that of Anna Freud. We will follow the beginnings of Klein’s attempts to re-think classical psychoanalytic theory to take into account what she was learning from her work with small children, using the play technique.
Friday 2 February 1:30 pm – 5.00 pm
Session 3: We will examine Anna Freud’s life and career, and the development of her thinking about children, during the second half of her life when she lived in London.
Session 4: We will explore Klein’s final theory of psychological development, which sees the experiences of the first year of life as laying the foundation of the personality. Klein’s mature writings contain a profound vision of the human condition, and we will examine its implications for psychotherapy, for art, and for the understanding of society.
Speaker:
Keith Barrett BA PhD received his first degree in philosophy from Oxford University after having spent three years working as a nursing assistant in psychiatric hospitals. It was in this practical context that Keith first encountered existentialism and psychoanalysis. He then began postgraduate studies on both Freud and Heidegger, leading finally to a PhD from the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL for a dissertation on ‘Freud’s Self-Analysis’. Keith has been a philosophy teacher for over 20 years, and has been delivering courses at the Freud Museum for over a decade, where he has developed a series of introductory lectures on Freud, psychoanalysis after Freud, and the overlap of philosophy and psychoanalysis.
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Tickets £ 45
Members receive 20% off with their promocode.
A limited number of bursary places will be available for those unable to pay the full amount. Please email [email protected] to apply for a bursary.
