Anna Freud Centre
child mental health research, training and treatment centre in London

The Anna Freud (formerly the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families) is a child mental health research, training, treatment and policy advisory charity based in London, United Kingdom. The Centre aims to transform mental health provision in the UK by improving the quality, accessibility and effectiveness of treatment, bringing together leaders in neuroscience, mental health, social care and education. It is closely associated with University College London (UCL) and Yale University. The Princess of Wales is its royal patron. The chair of trustees is the philanthropist Michael Samuel MBE and the chief executive is Eamon McCrory OBE.
History
The Hampstead Child Therapy Course was started by Anna Freud, daughter of Dr.Sigmund Freud, in 1947. Students included Joyce McDougall, who had her first experience of intensive analysis with children whilst on the course. The Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic was founded in 1952 by Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, and Helen Ross, becoming the first child psychoanalytic centre for observational research, teaching and learning. It was established as a charity with the purpose of providing training, treatment and research in child psychoanalysis. After Anna Freud's death in 1982, it was renamed in her honour.
Activities
In 2012 it stated that its aim is to secure its position as the leading psychoanalytic innovator and provider of mental health treatment to children and families in Europe.
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This entry incorporates text from “Anna Freud Centre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.