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Psychoanalysis
A Brief Review of Anna Freud's Concept of Altruistic Surrender
The old idea of altruistic surrender takes on new meaning for caretakers today.
Updated January 4, 2025 Reviewed by Margaret Foley
Anna Freud, 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.
According to the younger Freud:
"This defensive process serves two purposes. On the one hand it enables the subject to take a friendly interest in the gratification of other people's instincts and so, indirectly and in spite of the superego's prohibition, to gratify his own, while, on the other, it liberates the inhibited activity and aggression primarily designed to secure the fulfillment of the instinctual wishes in their original relation to himself."
In altruistic surrender, unlike identification with the aggressor, one projects desires onto another and introjects their pleasure instead of one's own. Anna Freud illustrates this through the experience of a patient4 who dreamed of having a large family and fine clothing as a child, with "urgent and insatiable" desires to match her older friends and siblings, appearing ambitious and competitive. Yet, as an adult, she became unassuming with modest demands, unmarried, and "rather shabby and inconspicuous." Clearly, something significant occurred between childhood and adulthood.
Playing the Part
The patient became an avid advocate for friends, a confidant for their love lives, a matchmaker, and professionally, a devoted governess caring for others' children with vigor. Her parents' harsh criticism of her various aspirations led her to renounce her wishes early in life. Rather than repressing these wishes, the patient found "proxy in the outside world to serve as a proxy for each of them," in the activities noted above, and in her choice of profession.
One time, for example, a young man the patient was said to have fancied showed interest in her older sister. Rather than succumbing to envy, when the young man arrived, the patient did everything she could to help her sister, and in doing so reported feeling both "blissfully happy" and forgetting her own disappointment. This exemplifies how altruistic surrender transforms bitterness into delight through identification with a friend or family member.
Infinitely Delayed Gratification?
This type of "altruistic surrender" is similar to, but contrasts with, identification with the aggressor. The alchemy hinges on the same ideas of repression and projection, but in altruistic surrender the individual adopts a loving rather than aggressive stance, seemingly transforming bitterness into delight, through identification with a friend or family member. This is someone who could be viewed as an aggressor, through the lens of envy and competition, but who—unlike with identification with the aggressor—is presumably innocent of aggression.
The cost is ongoing renunciation of one's own desires and needs. While vicarious gratification may protect others from one's jealousy and rage, it may not last. Anna Freud noted that it might also fend off death anxiety; caring about what will happen to others after one dies is a way to protect the ego, a concept elaborated in Ernest Becker's classic existential work The Denial of Death and terror management theory.
Today, altruistic surrender illuminates issues in caring professions, where burnout is common and personal needs are set aside. It may undergird some of the psychoanalytic processes underlying "compulsive caregiving" and "moral masochism," in which giving becomes self-destructive, and may relate to caregiver burnout, compassion fatigue and vicarious or secondary traumatic stress.
Being afraid of healthy aggression and competition, in the face of harsh self-criticism internalized from one's own caregivers, engenders chronic self-deprivation. Altruistic surrender, while appearing noble, may lead to an imbalance between caring for oneself and caring for others, resulting in a cycle of self-neglect masked as selfless devotion. Finding the line between giving and receiving is sometimes easier said than done.
References
1. Freud, A. (1936). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. In The Writings of Anna Freud (Vol. 2, pp. 3-191). New York, NY: International Universities Press.
2. “The effect of the mechanism of projection is to break the connection between the ideational representatives of dangerous instinctual impulses and the ego. In this it resembles most closely the process of repression. Other defensive processes, such as displacement, reversal or turning round upon the self, affect the instinctual process itself: repression and projection merely prevent its being perceived. In repression the objectionable idea is thrust back into the id, while in projection it is displaced into the outside world. Another point in which projection resembles repression is that it is not associated with any particular anxiety situation but may be motivated equally by objective anxiety, superego anxiety, and instinctual anxiety.”
3. Sandor Ferenczi introduced the concept of "identification with the aggressor" in his 1932 "Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child" paper. He is not referenced in Anna Freud's book.
4. One is tempted to wonder whether the patient is Anna Freud herself, disguised. For example, her brief biography from the British Psychoanalytical Society notes the following: "From early childhood, she did not get on with her mother and felt very jealous of her immediately elder sister. She admired her father greatly and by the age of fourteen already showed a real interest for psychoanalysis." Other factors are likely important, including her identification with her father, and her sexual orientation. In Anna Freud's case, it is tempting to wonder whether Identification with the aggressor was equivalent to altruistic surrender.
