Award of Excellence Recipient

The ACP Awards Committee is pleased to announce the 2024 Award of Excellence recipient is

The Anna Freud Foundation

Anna Freud Foundation Mission Statement

The Anna Freud Foundation, a tax-exempt organization, was established in 1953 by Dora Hartmann, Ruth Eissler, and Edith B. Jackson. The Foundation awards grants to applicants with proposals that are congruent with its mission, which is to promote psychoanalytic theory and practice, especially those stimulated by the child analyst, Anna Freud.

Anna Freud's Legacy: About Anna Freud - The Anna Freud Foundation

"The Developmental Lines, Therapeutic Action, and Broadening Social and Cultural Contexts of Her Work
Among Anna’s lasting accomplishments was her elucidation of the developmental process through her master concept, ‘the developmental lines.” From this emerged a novel way of formulating disorders of development and therapeutic strategies for treating them. In tandem with this work was her interest in applying these insights to children who resided along a diverse range of social circumstances and culture, including the child who was a refugee, the child who was institutionalized, the child who suffered abuse, the child with special needs. In particular, the seminal trio of volumes which she co-authored with Albert J. Solnit MD, the former director of the Yale Child Study Center, and Joseph Goldstein, former Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law at Yale Law School, entitled, In the Best Interest of the Child, Before the Best Interest of the Child, and Beyond the Best Interest of the Child, was a watershed in examining how custodial matters in divorce should be considered from the vantage point of the child with the emphasis on maintaining the continuity of the parent-child relationship.

In considering Anna Freud’s sustained endeavor to understand the mind of the child from the perch of the third decade of the twenty-first century, her innovations and originality of thought will continue to inform the greater social matrix and the uncertainties that lie ahead. In this regard, one might consider her father’s words as a credo for our time when he said, “The world belongs to child analysis.” (1925).

And one could add that it was Anna Freud who shone a brilliant light upon the world of child analysis."

Find out more about The Anna Freud Foundation Here