‘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.
Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, social psychiatrist and author of Main Street: How a City’s Heart Connects Us All –
‘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.’
Nick Midgley, author of Reading Anna Freud and Co-director of the Child Attachment and Psychological Therapies Research Unit at The Anna Freud Centre –
‘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 struggle to make sense of his own place in the world, as that world transforms around him.’
Maura Spiegel, Co-director of The Division of Narrative Medicine, Department of Medical –
‘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.’