Analysis and Exile

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 *