A Brief Review of Anna Freud's Concept of Altruistic Surrender
A Brief Review of Anna Freud's Concept of Altruistic Surrender
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Anna Sigmund Freud's youngest child, became a formidable force within psychoanalysis, focusing on child psychology. Initially a teacher, she switched to an earlier interest, psychoanalysis, while recovering from tuberculosis. After Gestapo interrogation in the late 1930s, she convinced her father to flee to England. There, she pursued child psychoanalysis, opening the Hampstead War Nurseries in 1941 for children displaced by World War II, and in 1959, the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic, later renamed the Anna Freud Center.
Her extensive publications covered children and war, ego function, and childhood and adolescent development, both normal and pathological. In the foreword of her significant work The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936)1 [sic], she wrote:
"[T]his book deals exclusively with one particular problem, i.e. with the ways and means by which the ego wards off unpleasure and anxiety, and exercises control over impulsive behaviors, affects, and instinctive urges."2
Later in the book, she discussed two specific defense examples, highlighting how negative emotions can transform one into both an aggressor and a helper.
Beyond Identification With the Aggressor to Altruistic Surrender
The chapter "Identification With the Aggressor"3 explains how victims adopt their oppressors' beliefs and values against all common sense—what Anna Freud called "one of the ego's most potent weapons in its dealings with external objects which arouse its anxiety." When frightened by aggression, one identifies with the aggressor and "introjects" their perceived strength, imitating the aggression to manage fear and restore a sense of power and safety.
Particularly intriguing is her chapter entitled "A Form of Altruism," which describes "altruistic surrender," a different defense mechanism that uses projection and identification as a helper, rather than identification with aggression. Altruistic surrender leads to ostensibly positive behaviors, standing in contrast to identification with the aggressor despite similarities in circumstance. Why does one person turn to aggression, and another to altruism?
She explains:
"The mechanism of projection disturbs our human relations when we project our own jealousy and attribute to other people our own aggressive acts. But it may work in another way as well, enabling us to form valuable positive attachments and so to consolidate our relations with one another. This normal and less conspicuous form of projection might be described as 'altruistic surrender' of our own instinctual impulses in favor of other people."
Rather than protecting "bad" or unpleasant aspects of one's fantasies and fears, or one's drives and instincts, onto others, in altruistic surrender desirable yet unattainable ambitions and aspirations are projected in the service of strengthening relations. A harsh superego, critical and disapproving of one's own needs, along with perceived or actual circumstances, leads one to take vicarious pleasure in helping others fulfill parallel wishes. Report this page