Table Of ContentThe Psychology of
Nursery Education
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF
NURSERY EDUCATION
Papers presented at the Anna Freud
Centenary Conference, November 25 7 995
edited by
IVAN WARD
for Marika
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Prof Albert Solnit and Alice Colonna for their
generous support, and the Anna Freud Centre for permission to publish
photographs from their collection.
Frontispiece: children playing at 'New Barn', one of the residential 'War
Nurseries', Lindsell near Dunmow, Essex.
Cover photographs: Paris (front cover); Marika, Zoya, and Naomi with
Aileen at the Anna Freud Centre Nursery 1995.
All photographs from the Freud Museum archives unless otherwise stated.
Published by Karnac Books
58 Gloucester Road, London SW74 QY
0 Freud Museum 1998
20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX
All rights reserved.
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been asserted in accordance with 9377 and 78 of the Copyright Design and
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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British Library Cataloging in Publication Data
A C.I.P. record of this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 1 85575 206 9
Designed and typeset by Ivan Ward
Printed by BPC Wheatons, Exeter, England.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Ivan Ward 7
-
Nursery School Why and When?
Anne-Marie Sandler 13
Principles of the Early Childhood
Curriculum
Tina Bruce 19
Learning Not to Talk
Adam Phillips 27
The-child-in-the-family-in-the-nursery
Ricky Emanuel 43
Anna Freud and the Social-Moral
Development of Young Children
Alice B. Colonna 66
Appendix:
Anna Freud on Nursery Education 87
Notes on contributors 95
INTRODUCTION
Ivan Ward
A
nna Freud, the daughter of Sigmund Freud, was a
pioneer in nursery education and child mental
health. Born on 3 December 1895, Anna was the
youngest of Sigmund and Martha Freud’s six children. She
began her career as a primary school teacher in 1914, and later
trained as a psychoanalyst. Her early work with children
resulted in a book of lectures for teachers and parents entitled
Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis (1927). At that
time psychoanalysts were making many new discoveries
about the mind and were eager to apply their knowledge to
the problems of society. The early optimism was tempered by
experience, however. She was later to say of this period: ’Back
then in Vienna we were all so excited - full of energy: it was as
if a whole new continent was being explored, and we were
the explorers, and we now had a chance to change things .....’
(Coles, 1992)
7
The Psychology of Nursery Education
From 1927 until 1934 she was General Secretary of the
International Psychoanalytical Association. She continued her
child analytic practice, ran seminars on child analysis, organ-
ised conferences and, at home, helped nurse her father who
in 1923 had fallen prey to the cancer which blighted the last
sixteen years of his life. Having no children of her own her
attention was directed altruistically to the welfare of other
people’s children (Freud, A 1936).
In 1935 Anna became director of the Vienna Psycho-
analytical Training Institute: the following year she published
her influential study of the ’ways and means by which the
ego wards off unpleasure and anxiety’, The Ego and the Mecha-
nisms ofDefence (1936). To many the book represented a move
away from the traditional bases of psychoanalytic thought in
the drives and libido theory: it became a founding work of
ego psychology and established her reputation as a leading
theoretician. Freud himself had signalled a change some ten
years earlier with his book Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
(1926). This established anxiety and the attempts to avoid it
as the cornerstone of psychoanalysis. The mechanisms which
Anna Freud elucidated can be clearly seen in the behaviour of
nursery children today. Ricky Emanuel describes how proc-
esses of denial, projection, repression and so on, can be mani-
fested in the nursery situation. A child’s overt behaviour may
be a defensive response to cope with and modulate underly-
ing anxiety; an insight which is at once obvious and yet truly
enlightening. It opens up a new world of understanding for
the nursery teacher and offers the possibility of engaging
with children in a different way. Anne-Marie Sandler shows
how similar considerations apply to the question of a particu-
lar child’s readiness to start nursery school. It is not simply a
matter of chronological age.
The economic and political situation in Austria worsened
in the 1930’s. Anna Freud and her close friend and colleague,
Dorothy Burlingham, were concerned by the situation and
8
Introduction
involved themselves in charitable initiatives. In 1937 she had
the opportunity of combining charity with her own work
when the American, Edith Jackson, financed a nursery school
for children of the poor in Vienna. The school was regarded
as a chance to study and observe the first years of life. They
allowed the children to choose their own food and respected
their freedom to organise their own play. The crucial concern
was with what we might now call ‘agency’. Like many teach-
ers since, the two women were struck by the difference be-
tween depressed and passive children who could hardly be
bothered to eat, and active subjects with a lively interest in
their surroundings. If each child was allowed to make choices
and influence his or her environment, they hypothesised, it
would increase the motivation to engage actively with the
outside world in general (Young-Bruehl, 1988 p223). Alice
Colonna discusses and concurs with Anna Freud’s attitude to
these issues in her paper, and Tina Bruce emphasises the
importance to children of feeling in control of their play. She
suggests that this can be jeopardised by some of the demands
of the national curriculum. Whether Anna Freud today might
think that children have too much freedom of choice and not
enough structure and containment one can only speculate,
but her early experiment with severely deprived children
was clearly successful. Though some of the children’s parents
were desperately poor and had been reduced to begging,
Anna wrote ... we were very struck by the fact that they
”
brought the children to us, not because we fed and clothed
them and kept them for the length of the day, but because
‘they learned so much‘, i.e. they learned to move freely, to eat
independently, to speak, to express their preferences, etc. To
our own surprise the parents valued this beyond everything.”
(Coles, 1992 p203)
Within a few months, in March 1938, the nursery had to
be closed, Austria was taken over by the Nazis, and the
Freuds escaped to England. In early September 1939 war
9
