Dr Sian Williams nominates Anna Freud

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0:53Matthew Parris:From the BBC World Service, World of Secrets, The Darkest Web follows their shocking investigations. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your BBC podcasts. There are some surnames that carry unusual weight. I shudder to think what it must be like to be born a Churchill or a Charlton or even a Thatcher. The surname of our great life today probably trumps all three. And to find out more about that name, I should introduce my guest. Dr Sian Williams is familiar to Radio 4 listeners as the presenter of Life Changing, having enjoyed a notable career on TV as both a newsreader and presenter, but she stepped away from broadcasting for a while to add another string to her bow, gaining a professional doctorate in counselling psychology and an MSc in psychology.

1:49Matthew Parris:So for part of the week, she's a broadcaster and for the rest, she's a chartered counselling psychologist working for the NHS. Sian, Dr Sian, who is your choice for great lives with the great name and why?

2:05Dr Sian Williams:My choice for great lives is Anna Freud, often described as the devoted daughter of Sigmund and a psychoanalyst in her own right. But the reason I chose her was because when you're being trained as a psychologist, you are very aware of the great lives of great men in modern psychology. William James, Pavlov, Carl Rogers, and of course, Sigmund Freud himself. And while I was training, I was working with children and adolescents and Anna Freud's name would come up. And I wanted to know more about her. The discipline of psychology, and psychology is a science and a discipline, is full of women. They outnumber men at the moment by about three to one, certainly those doing doctoral training like I did.

2:55Dr Sian Williams:But there are few great names of women out there. And I guess I just wanted to champion Anna Freud as somebody who gave a huge amount to the treatment of children, the way we look at children. So if Sigmund was the father of psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis is a technique, so if psychology is the discipline, psychoanalysis is the technique, then Anna, I think, is the founder of child psychoanalysis.

3:29Matthew Parris:I suppose I shouldn't be surprised because Anna Freud was your special subject when you appeared on Celebrity Mastermind back in 2022, for which you didn't pass once. So don't pass on this. Could you give me a thumbnail sketch? And I do mean thumbnail because we're going to dive into it properly later of Anna's life.

3:51Dr Sian Williams:Anna was born in Vienna to Jewish parents Sigmund and Martha in 1895. She was the youngest of six. She had rather an unhappy childhood, although she was completely in awe of her father and really interested in his work from a very young age. She trained to be a teacher while she was also learning to be a psychoanalyst and actually being psychoanalyzed by her father more and on. In 1938, when the Nazis took over Austria, the family fled Vienna and came to London. Sigmund had been ill for quite some time with cancer. He died a year later. Anna set up the Hampstead War nurseries looking after children and then lived a very long and productive life until she died in 1982.

4:45Matthew Parris:I can give you top marks for that answer.

4:47Dr Sian Williams:I didn't look at my notes at once.

4:49Matthew Parris:I suppose for Anna, the name Freud, both a curse and a blessing, would you say?

4:55Dr Sian Williams:I think for her, she would see it as a blessing. She was a staunch defender of her father's legacy. And in fact, while she was young, she was only about 13, 14. She would be learning at his feet, or rather on a library ladder on their Wednesday meetings when Sigmund would invite all the sort of notable names in psychoanalysis to discuss psychoanalysis. So she would be learning from him.

5:21Matthew Parris:I'm also joined by Professor Nick Midgley, the director of the Child Attachment and Psychological Therapies Research Unit, a collaboration between University College London and Anna Freud, a mental health charity for children, young people and families. Nick, what do you think life was like for the youngest member of the Freud family? It was a very conservative culture in which she was born, a very patriarchal society, a very anti-Semitic society as well. But at the same time, Vienna was really the centre of cultural life in Europe at the time. There was Wittgenstein was there, Schiedler was there, Mahler was there as well.

6:01Matthew Parris:So I think she, in her early life, was caught between these two cultures that are very conservative traditional society, which really limited her options, like her educational opportunities were very limited, but also a rich cultural life. So her father had a very wide interest in literature and music and from an early age, as you were saying, she was very interested in that. She loved reading, she loved learning, loved writing poetry as well. So many of our great lives seem to have had some kind of shock or trauma in childhood. It sounds, Sian, as though she didn't.

6:35Dr Sian Williams:I think she experienced loss in childhood. There were times when she was left out because she was the youngest. So she talks, doesn't she, Nick, about the time when all the others went off on a rowing boat and she was left behind. But she was so delighted to be left with her father, who was encouraging to her that it didn't bother her at all. But she didn't have a very good relationship with her mother and there was a feeling of loss there. And I think, I don't know about you, Nick, I think that played into how she then subsequently worked with children, because a lot of what she did was about loss, was about that parental split, was about the child and the mother being separated.

7:22Dr Sian Williams:And then what does that child do when that relationship has been fractured? You know, she said, my mother has no rule. She sets her own rules. So there was nothing there. And also there was a bit of falling out in the family between Anna and her older sister, Sophie. She was quite jealous, allegedly, of Sophie. Sophie was called the pretty one and had grace and charm. And Anna was the clever one. And so they occupied these roles, didn't they?

7:54Matthew Parris:Yeah, that's right. And as the youngest, apparently one of the first phrases she learned to say was me too, me too. Because she was always feeling sort of left out by the older siblings. There was talk of an eating disorder.

8:05Dr Sian Williams:There is that quote, isn't there, Nick, that she was a very slender shape. She certainly did work in eating disorders later or disordered patterns of eating, didn't she? And she was sent away to health farms.

8:18Matthew Parris:And she was very interested in the whole question of how we learn to eat as well. Sort of how, as children, are we made to eat or do we discover food and do we enjoy food? So it's quite possible that also came from her own experiences.

8:32Dr Sian Williams:And that's really interesting, Nick, as well, because I remember the baby buffet. Do you remember the baby buffet? I think that was at the Jackson nursery in Vienna, where she or the team set out a sort of smorgasbord of food and allowed the children to make their own choices. so for the first couple of days they gorged on chocolate and then after a while they developed a much more balanced approach and that was very much her thing which is if you let the child do their own thing they'll find a way

9:05Matthew Parris:and also it comes back to what you were saying about observation earlier that she didn't know what was going to happen when she put that buffet out it wasn't that she knew this is what the children were doing but she said well let's do this let's observe let's step back not impose anything here see what happens and as you say what she discovered was that children actually were really able to regulate their own diets when they were given enough time for that but without that space of observation we might not have discovered that. She used to write to her father apparently outlining her dreams and it sounds a bit strange to me.

9:40Dr Sian Williams:It's strange anyway I think that for Anna to have psychoanalysis with her father they were very enmeshed in that way I mean now of course we wouldn't do it because ethically and psychologically it's probably not a good thing to be analysed by your own father

9:58Matthew Parris:probably not but I also think it it was another time so yes we absolutely would not do that today it's obviously not a good idea but at the time psychoanalysis wasn't this thing that you did for 15 minutes on a Thursday between 2 and 2.50. Psychoanalysis was, everyone was just so excited about, we've discovered the unconscious, we can explore it. And so I think, you know, after dinner, they would tell each other their dreams and analyse them. Freud would go for walks with his friends and they would analyse each other. So I think it was part of that wider culture of just, let's discover the unconscious together.

10:34Dr Sian Williams:Yes.

10:35Matthew Parris:It's always a bonus in these programmes if we can hear from the subject themselves. It's possible with Anna Freud, thanks to the BBC Archive. Here she is, speaking on a radio programme in May 1960. It was a question-and-answer session with a group of British doctors, probably recorded at what was to become the Anna Freud Centre.

10:57Dr Sian Williams:When I came here this afternoon, as you realise, I came quite unprepared, or you might say prepared for the worst, namely prepare to answer questions that are difficult to answer as single questions. Each question that will be asked here would probably be quite easy to answer in a wider context.

11:22Matthew Parris:Therefore I thought, or I think at this moment, that it may be quite necessary to have an idea of procedure in my own mind, how to deal with your questions. interesting there's something terribly precise about her and that Austrian accent is quite strong, how do you both respond to that? I've never heard that extract before so it's interesting to hear I love that moment where she said I thought, no I think and I think she didn't just come with pre-fixed ideas she came and what she wanted to share was the process of thinking, the process of looking itself so I thought that was a really interesting moment in that.

12:06Dr Sian Williams:It's lovely to hear her isn't it? I hadn't heard that either I don't think I've ever heard her voice actually Gosh, yeah. That must be the first time.

12:14Matthew Parris:I was struck by the precision

12:15Dr Sian Williams:Yes, but also it's quite tidy isn't it? She was quite, and in psychoanalysis there was some criticism of her that she was a bit regulated rather than the sort of, the rather freer psychoanalysis that came up in other places I might be over analysing her.

12:36Matthew Parris:No, no, I don't think you are. Tidy is the better word than precise. She came to maturity, Nick, in Vienna during the First World War and started out as a teaching apprentice. Was she just going to be an ordinary teacher? How did that work out? How did it develop? I think, I mean, she trained as a nursery teacher. Montessori's work was just developing and Freud was very influenced by a kind of child-centred education. And I think she She found that very appealing, the idea that we're not there to make children learn. We're there to create a setting in which children will want to learn. But also because it was that moment in Vienna where the First World War had just finished, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had collapsed.

13:21Matthew Parris:Vienna was very left-wing, socialist centre. People were thinking, our whole society's got it wrong and we need to build a different kind of society. And I think education was the place where people focused. So actually being a teacher was not like a second choice. It was this is the place where we can actually think about what would a new generation look like. How could we bring up a new generation differently to the one before? Tell me, Sian, about Dorothy Burlingham, the heir to the Tiffany Empire, and a woman with whom Anna had, let's just say, a powerful and lifelong bond. Or was it more than that?

13:59Matthew Parris:What do you think?

14:00Dr Sian Williams:Oh, I don't know. We're so fascinated, aren't we, by Dorothy Tiffany. Burlingham. So she grew up in this elite New York family, Dorothy. She was married to a well-known lawyer. She had four children. They came to Vienna ostensibly because she wanted her son Bob to have psychoanalysis. Introduced to the Freud family, she moved in with her children to the Freud household. Well, it's a blended family, isn't it? And then Dorothy and Anna, hit it off clearly and we don't know to what extent but it was a lifelong attachment I mean they were with each other for more than 40 years they lived together they worked together they published books together they opened the Hampstead War nurseries together which became a training centre which became the Anna Freud centre so she was Dorothy Burlingham was a huge figure in Anna's life.

14:59Dr Sian Williams:Now, the question you're asking is, did they have a sexual relationship? And I don't think anyone has a clear answer to that, because they were quite private. So as the phrase goes, I can get you to the bedroom door, but I can't take you any further in, because we simply don't know. But does it matter? If it had been more than a friendship, I dare say you wouldn't have

15:25Matthew Parris:disclosed that at that time, would you? She wouldn't have.

15:28Dr Sian Williams:Dorothy died and she died in 1979 and Hannah dies just a couple of years later. But Hannah was thought to have worn her sweaters just to be a little bit closer to Dorothy. That is a love. However you describe it, that is a love. Whether that was expressed sexually.

15:49Matthew Parris:We focus on the part of the internet that most people don't know about. It's called the dark web. Undercover in the furthest corners of the dark web, US special agents are on a mission to locate and rescue children from abuse. Move in now. From the BBC World Service, World of Secrets, the darkest web follows their shocking investigations. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your BBC podcasts.