Sophie Dann

Introduction

Sophie Dann (3 March 1900 – 18 December 1993) was a German-born children's nurse, nursery educator and midwife who became one of the most frequently cited co-authors in the postwar literature on childhood deprivation. Working alongside Anna Freud at the Hampstead War Nurseries in London, she helped run the residential home at Bulldogs Bank in West Sussex where six young Jewish orphans liberated from the Theresienstadt ghetto were cared for between 1945 and 1947. The resulting paper, "An Experiment in Group Upbringing" (1951), remains one of the very few detailed records of how children who grew up almost entirely without adult attachment figures later learned to relate to adults.

Dann is a figure who resists easy classification. She held no university degree in psychology and never held an academic post; her authority came from continuous, recorded, day-to-day observation of children. That fact is itself part of her legacy, because it places her at the centre of a methodological argument that is still live: how much weight should a small, uncontrolled, but extraordinarily detailed naturalistic case study carry against later, larger, better-controlled research on institutional deprivation?

Early Life and Education

Sophie Dann was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, into an upper-class Jewish merchant family; her father Albert Dann was active in the leadership of the city's Jewish community. Contemporary biographical research by Christiane Ludwig-Körner records that she trained as an educator, as a children's nurse and as a midwife, professions that in Germany at the time involved formal vocational qualifications rather than university study. Her younger sister Gertrud Dann (1908–1998) trained as a nursery infant nurse and ran her own kindergarten in Augsburg before the sisters left Germany.

The Nazi seizure of power dismantled that life. Anti-Jewish legislation cost Dann her post in 1933, and in 1939 she and Gertrud fled to Britain, leaving behind a family that was scattered by emigration and murder. Their father was imprisoned in 1938 and later emigrated to Palestine; he died in England in 1960.

The sisters' first years in England were harsh. Accustomed, in Ludwig-Körner's phrasing, to being looked after by servants, they worked as chambermaids and domestic help, and encountered both antisemitism and anti-German hostility from employers and strangers. Gertrud recorded that some employers would not let them touch children because they were Jewish, and that they were viewed with suspicion for their German accents. Their situation changed in June 1941, when both began working for Anna Freud — the beginning of a lifelong association.

Academic and Professional Career

The Hampstead War Nurseries

Anna Freud's war nurseries grew out of the Hampstead Nursery, which had been funded from 1940 by the Foster Parents Plan for War Children in New York. The nurseries looked after children evacuated or separated from their families during the Blitz, and they operated on a distinctive principle: staff kept systematic written records of children's daily behaviour, which were discussed each evening rather than left to memory. Dann was responsible for the baby department, for the mothers, and for the milk kitchen, and later also for the medical side of the nursery; she also supported Anna Freud's correspondence and research work. Gertrud, whose background in running a kindergarten had given her different expectations, initially found Anna Freud's way of handling children surprising.

This record-keeping culture is the direct methodological ancestor of the 1951 paper. Whatever its limits, "An Experiment in Group Upbringing" was not a recollection assembled after the fact but a distillation of notes taken at the time.

Bulldogs Bank

In 1945 Dann underwent a major operation requiring a long convalescence, and Lady Rebekah Clarke — a patron of Anna Freud's work and wife of the East Grinstead MP Ralph Clarke — offered her a place to recover in West Hoathly. The Clarkes purchased Bulldogs Bank, a house between West Hoathly and Sharpthorne, and turned it into a home for six orphaned children under the Foster Parents Plan.

The six children arrived in Britain on 15 August 1945, flown from Czechoslovakia and landing at a reception camp at Windermere in the Lake District along with roughly 300 other young survivors. They had spent more than two years in Theresienstadt, having entered as infants; their parents had been killed, and they had been held in the "ward for motherless children" with no toys and almost no adult contact. After liberation in spring 1945 they spent a period in a Czech castle where they were well cared for, before being sent on to England. The group reached Bulldogs Bank in October 1945. The staff were Sophie and Gertrud Dann, Maureen Wolfison from Windermere, and Judith Gaulton. Dann stayed with the children through their years there, then moved on to work at the Weir Courtney and Lingfield House hostels for other young survivors. She remained associated with Anna Freud's work and with the Hampstead Clinic.

Major Contributions to Psychology

An Experiment in Group Upbringing

The 1951 paper, published in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (volume 6, pages 127–168) under the joint names of Anna Freud and Sophie Dann, described what happened when six children who had never known family life were looked after together.

On arrival the children destroyed the toys and damaged much of the furniture. Toward adults they alternated between cold indifference and active hostility: they would turn to an adult when they had an immediate need and treat that person as non-existent once it was met, and in anger they would hit, bite or spit. They had almost no language beyond a few German and Czech words and insults. Their attachment to one another, by contrast, was intense and exclusive. They refused to be separated even briefly, insisted that everything — food, attention, treatment — be shared equally, cared for each other's safety on walks, and were described by the authors as showing "a warmth and spontaneity that are unheard of in ordinary relations between young contemporaries."

Over the following year the pattern changed. From late 1945 the children began to insist that staff take turns and share; by early 1946 they wanted to know where adults were when absent; by spring 1946 they showed consideration and helpfulness toward staff and began to identify with them, and one child formed a lasting attachment to a neighbour. Speech and play developed rapidly. The children's relationships with adults improved, though Freud and Dann recorded that those relationships never became as important to the children as their relationships with each other.

What the study was taken to show

Three claims from the paper have been widely repeated. First, that children who have formed no secure attachment to adults can form strong attachments to peers, and that this peer bond can sustain development through severe deprivation. Second, that children exposed to extreme deprivation catch up quickly once placed in a stimulating environment. Third, and most quoted, that the children were "neither deficient, delinquent nor psychotic" — a direct rebuttal of the assumption that severely disturbed behaviour in such children indicated innate defect or incipient mental illness.

A separate, less cited document by Dann, "The Adaptation to a New Language," preserved her notes on the children's acquisition of English, recording exchanges such as a child's progression from "flowers" to "many lovely flowers, thank you!" within weeks.

Major Publications

Dann's published output was small, and its centre of gravity is the single collaborative paper for which she is known.

Freud, A., & Dann, S. (1951). An experiment in group upbringing. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 6, 127–168.
Dann, S. "The Adaptation to a New Language," working notes on the Bulldogs Bank children's acquisition of English, held in the West Sussex Record Office (Add Mss 36784).

Readers occasionally encounter book-length titles attributed to Dann, including a supposed volume on group upbringing and peer attachment. No such book has been located in library catalogues or in the archival finding aids for the Dann papers, and it should not be cited.

Impact and Legacy

The paper became a reference point in debates about maternal deprivation at exactly the moment those debates were hardening. John Bowlby's attachment theory, developed in the same period, held that a child's bond to a mother figure was the foundation of later mental health and that prolonged separation carried lasting risk. Freud and Dann's six children appeared to be a counterexample: they had had no mother figure at all, yet they emerged, on the authors' account, neither deficient nor psychotic. The study is therefore routinely cited on both sides of that argument, and it is not uncommon to see it described loosely as evidence that "peer groups can replace parents."

Criticism and limits

The methodological objections are serious and were acknowledged in substance even by sympathetic readers. The sample is six children. There is no comparison or control group, no standardised assessment, and no blind observation; the observers were also the children's caregivers, which creates obvious allegiance effects. The children's pre-arrival histories were reconstructed rather than measured, so the precise extent and timing of their deprivation is uncertain. Crucially, they were not typical institutionalised children: they had had each other from infancy, they had received good care in a Czech castle for months before travelling to England, and they arrived as a bonded group into a home with an unusually high staff-to-child ratio and a patron able to fund it. The paper reports roughly one year of observation, so it cannot speak to adult outcome at all — a gap one commentator noted frankly by observing that we do not know what became of these children emotionally in later life.

Later evidence cuts against the strongest reading of the "catch-up" claim. Michael Rutter and colleagues' English and Romanian Adoptees study followed children adopted out of profoundly depriving Romanian institutions, and found dose-dependent, partly persistent effects: children exposed to deprivation beyond about six months showed raised rates of attachment disorder-like behaviour, cognitive impairment and inattention that often continued into adolescence, though many improved substantially. On that evidence, severe early deprivation is not simply erased by a good environment. Defenders of the Bulldogs Bank work reply that the two populations are not comparable — the Theresienstadt six were deprived in some ways but continuously bonded to each other, whereas the Romanian orphans were deprived of both adult and peer relationships — and that the 1951 paper's actual claim was about the absence of gross pathology, not about the absence of all lasting effects.

A further criticism concerns authorship and interpretation. The paper is universally cited as "Freud and Dann," but Anna Freud was the senior figure and the theoretical voice; a family account relayed by Sophie Freud suggests that the extreme circumstances of the case inhibited Anna Freud from drawing out the full theoretical implications of what the two women had observed. Dann's own voice survives mainly in the observational notes rather than in the argument. Recent work by Ludwig-Körner, The Women of Anna Freud's War Nurseries: Their Lives and Work, has gone some way toward recovering the contribution of Dann and her colleagues as practitioners and recorders in their own right.

What has proved durable is the clinical point rather than the theoretical one. The insistence that frightening behaviour in a deprived child may be an intelligible response to an abnormal environment, rather than evidence of defect or incipient psychosis, has become standard in trauma-informed residential care, and the Anna Freud Centre continues to cite the study for exactly that lesson. The children themselves remained close; they were separated when formally adopted and were reunited as adults.

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References

Dann, S. (1977). The development of second affective relationships in young children. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.