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Great Lives

Dr Sian Williams nominates Anna Freud

Great Lives

BBC

Documentary, History, Society & Culture

4.21.3K Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2026

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Matthew Parris invites a fellow Radio 4 presenter into the studio to nominate a Great Life. Dr Sian Williams, who as well as a broadcaster is a counselling psychologist chooses Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund and considered by many to be the founder of psychoanalytic child psychology.

Anna Freud was born in Vienna in 1895, the youngest child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. She was brought up in a city alive with pioneering culture and with a father at the forefront of new work in psychoanalysis. Although the youngest of the family, Anna had a close relationship with her father, sitting in on his psychoanalysis meetings from a young age before the conservative limitations of the time lead her into teaching. After the trauma of the 1st World War she started a nursery in VIenna that sought to help the young children of the poorest members of society. With the Anschluss of Austria in 1938 she was arrested by the Gestapo but freed. It was enough to persuade her father, who was dying of cancer, to take the family out of the country. They settled in London but Sigmund died soon after.

With the onset of war, and in a completely new environment, Anna rekindled her work with the launch of the Hampstead Nurseries. Again the aim was to provide support and help for very young children who's parents had either been killed or were away in the armed forces. The nurseries pioneered a supportive, observational system, giving children the space to express themselves in play and without the threat of punishment. Her reputation survives her in the form of the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families.

Matthew and Sian are joined by Nick Midgley, Professor of Psychological Therapies for Children and Young People in the Research Department of Clinical, Educational, and Health Psychology at University College London as well as working at Anna Freud.

Producer; Tom Alban

Transcript

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0:00.0

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to be born a Churchill or a Charlton or even a Thatcher. The surname of our great life today

0:50.8

probably trumps all three. And to find out more about that name, I should

0:55.9

introduce my guest. Dr. Sean Williams is familiar to Radio 4 listeners as the presenter of

1:02.4

life-changing, having enjoyed a notable career on TV as both a newsreader and presenter, but she

1:09.5

stepped away from broadcasting for a while to add another

1:12.8

string to her bow, gaining a professional doctorate in counselling psychology and an MSC in psychology.

1:19.6

So for part of the week she's a broadcaster, and for the rest she's a chartered counselling

1:25.6

psychologist working for the NHS.

1:29.1

Sean, Dr. Sean, who is your choice for great lives with the great name and why?

1:35.5

My choice for great lives is Anna Freud, often described as the devoted daughter of Sigmund

1:43.3

and a psychoanalyst in her own right. But the reason

1:47.6

I chose her was because when you're being trained as a psychologist, you are very aware of the great

1:54.4

lives of great men in modern psychology, William James, Pavlov, Karl Rogers, and of course, Sigmund Freud himself.

...

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