Her first analysis was conducted by her father Sigmund Freud from 1918 to 1922 (then a second analysis from 1924 to 1929).
In 1935, Freud became director of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Training Institute and in the following year she published her influential study of the "ways and means by which the ego wards off depression, displeasure and anxiety", The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence.