Overview

This is the story of Peter Heller, one of the first children to be psychoanalysed by Anna Freud and one of the 20 students invited to attend her experimental school in 1920s Vienna. Vivian Heller draws on a wealth of primary sources that include her father's case history and his internment diary, using novelistic techniques to bring the past alive. 'When my father was a little boy in Vienna, he told Anna Freud this dream: He is walking on the rim of the white gravel path that leads around the oval pond in the upper part of the Belvedere Gardens. The birds are singing, the sun is out ... Then a blue-black machine with a brilliant array of handles and shafts comes into sight ... The machine comes closer and closer ... He calls out for help as loud as he can, but no one comes to rescue him. There is nothing he can do; the machine grinds him up.' Analysis and Exile: Boyhood, Loss, and the Lessons of Anna Freud is a biography with privileged access to historical events, skilfully narrated through the experiences of a young boy, Peter Heller. Peter attended Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham's Hietzing School in 1920s Vienna. While Anna Freud tries to teach little Peter how to overcome his fears, their native Vienna slides into fascism and he is forced to navigate an increasingly dangerous world. When he is eighteen, he flees to England, only to be deported to Canada, where he is interned as a German-speaking foreign national, placed in the same camp as Nazi POWs. This incredible story explores the unfolding events surrounding Second World War through the eyes of a young boy trying to stay alive and find his place in the world. It will appeal to anyone with an interest in the history of psychoanalysis, progressive education, Red Vienna, and the European Jewish diaspora in the Second World War. AUTHOR: Vivian Heller received her Ph.D. in English Literature and Modern Studies from Yale University. She is the author of Joyce, Decadence, and Emancipation (University of Illinois Press) which won the Choice Book Award, and The City Beneath Us: Building the New York Subway. Her essays have appeared in New Observations, the Journal of Literature and Medicine, and The Georgetown Review; her short fiction has been published in Confrontation, Bomb, and Fence. She works at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia University.

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9781913494360

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Reviews

What Vivian Heller has accomplished in this book is little short of a miracle - it brings an incomprehensible story into the everyday. I am so gripped by the images - a balcony over a lake near Vienna, a drawing for Anna Freud, writing a journal in a Canadian concentration camp - that I want the words to go on and on. Instead, I am left in the country of analysis with the layers of the onion of life. Somehow the surprise of all this leaves me enriched beyond my wildest dreams and deeply grateful to the Hellers for sharing from the heart of darkness through which they have passed. -- Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD Vivian Heller has written a rich and fascinating biography of her father, Peter Heller, who was in psychoanalysis with Anna Freud as a child, and attended the experimental school that she helped to establish. The biography follows a journey from his unusual childhood in the Vienna of the 1930s, through escape to England, internment in POW camps in England and Canada, and finally to his arrival in the United States. It is not only a remarkable portrait of a young man's development - it also gives an unusually intimate portrait of the early years of child psychoanalysis, the rise of fascism in Europe and the shameful treatment of Jewish refugees escaping Nazi persecution. This is both social history and a rich account of a young man's struggles to make sense of his own place in the world, as that world transforms around him. -- Nick Midgley * author of Reading Anna Freud *

What Vivian Heller has accomplished in this book is little short of a miracle - it brings an incomprehensible story into the everyday. I am so gripped by the images - a balcony over a lake near Vienna, a drawing for Anna Freud, writing a journal in a Canadian concentration camp - that I want the words to go on and on. Instead, I am left in the country of analysis with the layers of the onion of life. Somehow the surprise of all this leaves me enriched beyond my wildest dreams and deeply grateful to the Hellers for sharing from the heart of darkness through which they have passed. -- Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD

Author Information

Vivian Heller received her PhD in English Literature and Modern Studies from Yale University. She is the author of Joyce, Decadence, and Emancipation (University of Illinois Press) which won the Choice Book Award, and The City Beneath Us: Building the New York Subway. Her essays have appeared in New Observations, the Journal of Literature and Medicine, and The Georgetown Review; her short fiction has been published in Confrontation, Bomb, and Fence. She works at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia University.

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