Analysis and Exile

Boyhood, Loss, and the Lessons of Anna Freud

By: Vivian Heller

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Paperback | 27 May 2022

At a Glance

Paperback
304 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.5 x 15.88 x 1.91

Paperback

$43.99

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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 father's case history and his internment diary, using novelistic techniques to bring the past alive.

About the 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.

Industry 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

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