Quotes from Anna Freud

A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock.

My different personalities leave me in peace now.

Everyone here says in a surprised manner that I have grown... they are so stupid and do not notice that I am standing up straighter!

It is only when parental feelings are ineffective or too ambivalent or when the mother's emotions are temporarily engaged elsewhere that children feel lost.

If some longing goes unmet, don't be astonished. We call that Life.

Everything becomes so problematic because of basic faults: from a discontent with myself.

Why do we go around acting as though everything was friendship and reliability when basically everything everywhere is full of sudden hate and ugliness?

Papa always makes it clear that he would like to know me as much more rational and lucid than the girls and women he gets to know during his analytic hours.

We live trapped, between the churned-up and examined past and a future that waits for our work.

My different personalities leave me in peace now.

I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence, but it comes from within. It is there all the time.

Sometimes the most beautiful thing is precisely the one that comes unexpectedly and unearned.

In our dreams we can have our eggs cooked exactly how we want them, but we can't eat them.

Create around one at least a small circle where matters are arranged as one wants them to be.

Instead of turning away from them (war conditions) in instinctive horror, as people seem to expect, the child may turn towards them with primitive excitement. The real danger is not that the child, caught up all innocently in the whirlpool of war, will be shocked into illness. The danger lies in the fact that the destruction ranging in the outer world may meet the very real aggressiveness ranging in the inside of the child

I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence, but it comes from within. It is there all of the time.

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.

There are few situations in life which are more difficult to cope with than an adolescent son or daughter during the attempt to liberate themselves.

I am no longer afraid to say anything.

Vivimos atrapados entre el pasado agitado y examinado, y un futuro que espera nuestro trabajo

Who promised you that only for joy were you brought to this earth?

What I have always wanted for myself is much more primitive. It is probably nothing more than the affection of the people with whom I am in contact, and their good opinion of me.

I am glad that I do not have any children.

We are imprisoned in the realm of life, like a sailor on his tiny boat, on an infinite ocean.