Anna Freud Centre

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Anna Freud Centre
Founded1952
TypeCharitable organisation
Registration no.England and Wales: 1077106 [1]
FocusChild psychoanalysis
Location
  • London, United Kingdom
Key people
Peter Fonagy (Chief Executive)
Patron:
The Princess of Wales
Website annafreud.org

The Anna Freud Centre (now renamed Anna Freud) is a child mental health research, training and treatment centre located in London, United Kingdom. The Centre aims to transform current mental health provision in the UK by improving the quality, accessibility and effectiveness of treatment, bringing together leaders in neuroscience, mental health, social care and education. It is closely associated with University College London (UCL) and Yale University. The Princess of Wales is its royal patron.

Contents

History

The Hampstead Child Therapy Course was started by Anna Freud in 1947. Students included Joyce McDougall, who had her first experience of intensive analysis with children whilst on the course. [2] The Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic was founded in 1952 by Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, and Helen Ross, becoming the first child psychoanalytic centre for observational research, teaching and learning. [3] [4] The Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic was established as a charity with the purpose of providing training, treatment and research in child psychoanalysis. After Anna Freud's death in 1982, the Centre was renamed the "Anna Freud Centre". [3]

The Centre's current Directors, Linda Mayes, Peter Fonagy, and Mary Target, were appointed in 2003. Their aim has been to secure the Anna Freud Centre's position as the leading psychoanalytic innovator and provider of mental health treatment to children and families in Europe. [3]

In June 2003 a study conducted jointly by the Anna Freud Centre, Great Ormond Street Hospital and Coram Family Adoption Services on the way in which abused children can have their faith in adults restored through adoption was published. [5] In September 2009 a collaborative project involving the Anna Freud Centre, Kids Company and UCL was launched to study what happens to the brains of children who have suffered early trauma. [6] In May 2010 a campaign was launched by the charity Kids Company to raise £5 million to fund a study into how children's brain development is affected by loving care and attachment, with the study work to be conducted by the Anna Freud Centre in partnership with the Institute of Psychiatry, UCL, the Tavistock Clinic and Oxford University. [7]

Activities

Treatment

The Centre provides short-term and long-term specialist treatments for children suffering from mental illnesses. [8]

Research

The Centre conducts research in collaboration with the Yale University Child Study Center and the Menninger Department of Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine. [9] The Centre's historic links with Yale University have been renewed through the recently established Anna Freud Centre/Yale Child Study Center Bridge Programme. Research teams from the Menninger Department of Psychiatry, the Anna Freud Centre and Yale Child Study Center form a developmental and clinical psychoanalytically-inspired research consortium.

The Centre also hosts the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) Evidence Based Practice Unit, an interdisciplinary research unit which is part of University College London. [10] Its research focuses on supporting the implementation of evidence-based practice and also gathering practice-based evidence for mental health interventions. Current projects include a national evaluation of therapies (part of the Children and Young People's Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme); research on shared decision making; and the development of models for resource need as part of the CAMHS Payment by Results project.

Research activity can be funded by public bodies (for example the Education for Wellbeing project finded by the Department for Education [11] ). Individual charities commission Anna Freud to carry out evaluative research into the effectiveness of their own services (for example 42nd Street (mental health charity) commissioned Anna Freud to review their TC42 service in 2020 [12] ). Research can be based on collaboration with other bodies (for example a study into adoption working with Coram and Great Ormond Street Hospital [13] )

Teaching

The Centre offers the following certificate, diploma and MSc courses: [14]

The Centre also offers an extensive range of short courses. [15]

Library

The Anna Freud Centre Library supports the academic, clinical and research activities at the Centre. [16] It currently holds approximately 2,000 books covering both historical and contemporary psychoanalytic material, and subscribes to 22 journal titles. [16] Electronic access to research publications is also available. [16]

Alumni

Notable alumni of the Centre include Erna Furman.

See also

Related Research Articles

Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind, and which together form a method of treatment for mental disorders. The discipline was established in the early 1890s by Sigmund Freud, whose work stemmed partly from the clinical work of Josef Breuer and others. Freud developed and refined the theory and practice of psychoanalysis until his death in 1939. In an encyclopedic article, he identified the cornerstones of psychoanalysis as "the assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of repression and resistance, the appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus complex." Freud's colleagues Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung developed offshoots of psychoanalysis which they called individual psychology (Adler) and analytical psychology (Jung), although Freud himself wrote a number of criticisms of them and emphatically denied that they were forms of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was later developed in different directions by neo-Freudian thinkers, such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anna Freud</span> Austrian–British psychoanalyst (1895–1982)

Anna Freud CBE was a British psychoanalyst of Austrian–Jewish descent. She was born in Vienna, the sixth and youngest child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. She followed the path of her father and contributed to the field of psychoanalysis. Alongside Hermine Hug-Hellmuth and Melanie Klein, she may be considered the founder of psychoanalytic child psychology.

Selma Fraiberg (1918–1981) was an American child psychoanalyst, author and social worker.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Play therapy</span> Childrens mental health therapy method

Play therapy refers to a range of methods of capitalising on children's natural urge to explore and harnessing it to meet and respond to the developmental and later also their mental health needs. It is also used for forensic or psychological assessment purposes where the individual is too young or too traumatised to give a verbal account of adverse, abusive or potentially criminal circumstances in their life.

Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) is the name for care provided by the NHS and other organisations in the United Kingdom for children, generally until school-leaving age, who have difficulties with their emotional well-being or are deemed to have persistent behavioural problems. The service is also known as Children and Young People’s Mental Health Services (CYPMHS). CAMHS offer children, young people and their families access to support for mental health issues from third sector (charity) organisations, school-based counselling, primary care as well as specialist mental health services. The exact services provided may vary, reflecting commissioning and providing arrangements agreed at local level.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter B. Neubauer</span> American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst

Peter Bela Neubauer was an Austrian-born American child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Fonagy</span> British psychoanalyst & psychologist

Peter Fonagy, is a Hungarian-born British psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist. He studied clinical psychology at University College London. He is a Professor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Developmental Science Head of the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences at University College London, Chief Executive of the Anna Freud Centre, and a training and supervising analyst in the British Psycho-Analytical Society in child and adult analysis. His clinical interests center on issues of borderline psychopathology, violence, and early attachment relationships. His work attempts to integrate empirical research with psychoanalytic theory. He has published over 500 papers, and 270 chapters and has authored 19 and edited 17 books.

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Child psychoanalysis is a sub-field of psychoanalysis which was founded by Anna Freud.

Psychodynamic Therapy with Infants and Parents aims to relieve emotional disturbances within the parent(s), the baby, and/or their interaction, for example, postnatal depression and anxiety, infant distress with breastfeeding and sleep, and attachment disorders. It rests on attachment theory and psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud suggested that a modification of his method could be applied to children, and child analysis was introduced in the 1920s by [Anna Freud].., [Melanie Klein], and Hermine Hug von Hellmuth. Klein speculated on infantile experiences to understand her patients' disorders but she did not practice PTIP. Donald Winnicott, a pediatrician and analyst, focused on the mother-baby interplay in his theorizing and his brief parent-child consultations, but he did not work with PTIP.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Miranda Wolpert</span> British clinical psychologist and researcher

Miranda Wolpert, Lady Sales is professor of evidence-based practice and mental health at University College London. She was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2017 New Year Honours for her work on young people's mental health. She is Director of Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joyce Robertson</span> British psychiatric social worker (1919–2013)

Joyce Robertson was a British psychiatric social worker, child behavioural researcher, childcare pioneer and pacifist, who was most notable for changing attitudes to the societally acceptable, institutionalised care and hospitalisation of young children, that was prevalent. In the late 1940s Robertson worked with Anna Freud first at the Well Baby Clinic and later in the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic. She was later joined by her husband James Robertson. In 1965, both of them moved to the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations to work with John Bowlby on the Young Children in Brief Separation project and the development of attachment theory. This was to research the mental state and psychological development of children who underwent brief separation from their parents. Later in her career, Robertson worked with her husband to produce a series of celebrated documentary films that highlighted the reaction of small children who were separated from their parents. These were shown in hospitals, foster care and state run hospitals. Later she was known for promoting the idea of foster care instead of residential nurseries.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eamon McCrory</span> Clinical psychologist

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Ilse Hellman Noach was an Austrian-British psychoanalyst and child development expert. She worked with child evacuees from London with psychological issues in the first two years of the Second World War under the employ of the Home Office before working at Anna Freud's Hampstead War Nurseries until the war was over. Hellman trained in psychoanalysis under Dorothy Burlingham and worked at Burlingham's and Freud's Hampsead Child Therapy Course and Clinic from 1945 until her retirement in 1992. She published From War Babies to Grandmothers: Forty-Eight Years in Psychoanalysis in 1990.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elisabeth Geleerd</span> Dutch-American psychoanalyst (1909–1969)

Elisabeth Rozetta Geleerd Loewenstein was a Dutch-American psychoanalyst. Born to an upper-middle-class family in Rotterdam, Geleerd studied psychoanalysis in Vienna, then London, under Anna Freud. Building a career in the United States, she became one of the nation's major practitioners in child and adolescent psychoanalysis throughout the mid-20th century. Geleerd specialized in the psychoanalysis of psychosis, including schizophrenia, and was an influential writer on psychoanalysis in childhood schizophrenia. She was one of the first writers to consider the concept of borderline personality disorder in childhood.

References

  1. "The Anna Freud Centre". Charity Commission. Retrieved 17 April 2011.
  2. "Joyce McDougall obituary". The Guardian. 24 October 2011. Retrieved 4 November 2011.
  3. 1 2 3 "History". The Anna Freud Centre. Archived from the original on 13 March 2012. Retrieved 14 February 2012.
  4. Robert A. King, Peter B. Neubauer and Samuel Abrams (2008), The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Volume 62, United States of America: Yale University Press, ISBN   0300125402 , retrieved 17 April 2011
  5. "How abused children learn to trust adults". The Guardian. 22 June 2003. Retrieved 17 April 2011.
  6. "We should separate at-risk children from their parents at birth". The Telegraph. 8 September 2009. Archived from the original on 3 October 2009. Retrieved 17 April 2011.
  7. "Metro Urban Action: Girls aged eight are carrying weapons". Metro. 16 May 2010. Retrieved 17 April 2011.
  8. "Services". The Anna Freud Centre. Archived from the original on 15 January 2012. Retrieved 14 February 2012.
  9. "Research". The Anna Freud Centre. Archived from the original on 29 June 2007. Retrieved 14 February 2012.
  10. "Education for Wellbeing" . Retrieved 10 March 2024.
  11. "Anna Freud Review of TC42" (PDF). Retrieved 10 March 2024.
  12. "Adoption and Attachment Research Study" . Retrieved 10 March 2024.
  13. "UCL Programmes". The Anna Freud Centre. Archived from the original on 26 February 2012. Retrieved 14 February 2012.
  14. "Courses". The Anna Freud Centre. Retrieved 14 February 2012.
  15. 1 2 3 "The Library". The Anna Freud Centre. Archived from the original on 9 May 2008. Retrieved 6 September 2010.

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