Reading Anna Freud - Author’s Talk:Nick Midgley

Filmed at the Anna Freud Centre on 7 March 2013 How should we read Anna Freud's work today? At one point her classic work, 'The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence', was described as 'perhaps the single most widely read book in our professional literature', but today a great deal of her work is out of print and her prominence in psychoanalytic thinking (at least in the UK) has been eclipsed by the work of Klein, Bowlby, Bion, Winnicott and others. In this lecture Nick Midgley considers some ways in which Anna Freud's work can be read today, and suggest that her work is still of value for the way it uses psychoanalytic thinking - both within and beyond the clinical setting - to help us make a difference to the well-being of children and young people. Nick Midgley is a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist at the Anna Freud Centre, London, and Course Director for the MSc in Developmental Psychology and Clinical Practice at UCL. He is the author of 'Reading Anna Freud', published by Routledge / the New Library of Psychoanalysis in 2013.