Analysis and Exile: Boyhood, Loss, and the Lessons of Anna Freud

(Paperback)

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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 the story of the childhood and youth of Peter Heller, one of the first children to be psychoanalyzed by Anna Freud and one of the 20 students invited to attend her experimental school

in 1920s Vienna. While Anna Freud tries to teach him how to overcome his fears, Peter's native Vienna slides into Fascist barbarism 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; here Jewish refugees and Nazi P.O.W.s live cheek by jowl. To tell this story, Vivian Heller draws on a wealth of primary sources, including her fathers case history and his internment diary, using novelistic techniques to bring the past alive.

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. 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, social psychiatrist and author
of Main Street: How a City's Heart Connects Us All

"Analysis and Exile 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 and Co-Director of the Child Attachment and
Psychological Therapies Research Unit at The Anna Freud Centre

"Heller weaves her remarkable
resources of diaries, letters, Freud's clinical notes, recorded conversations
and drawings, into pure gold. In these delicious pages we enter Berggasse 19
through the perspective of a little boy, the son of a Viennese candy magnate in
treatment with Anna Freud. We see the psychoanalytic work in action, but the
delights of this book are not just for psychoanalysts; we are treated to so
many and varied pleasures, a rich historical fabric, privileged access to
figures of consequence, a remarkable family story, girded intellectual
underpinnings, and incandescent prose." - Maura Spiegel, Co-Director of The
Division of Narrative Medicine, Department of Medical Humanities and
Ethics, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

Author Bio

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,andThe 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