Analysis and Exile: Peter Heller and the early history of child psychoanalysis

Broadcast: 3 Dec, 2022 Duration: 1 hour 28 minutes

A special online event marking Anna Freud’s birthday 2022.

Analysis and Exile: Boyhood, Loss and the Lessons of Anna Freud provides an intimate perspective on a turning point in history. Vivian Heller tells the story of her father, Peter Heller, a young Viennese boy who suffers from night terrors in 1929. The son of a wealthy Jewish industrialist, Peter becomes one of the first child patients of Anna Freud, looking to her as a substitute for the mother who has abandoned him. He also becomes one of the twenty students at the experimental school she has just founded. Anna Freud tries to help him overcome his irrational fears. Within the sheltering walls of the school created by Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham — Tiffany heiress and devoted friend – and the young Erik Erikson, an artist about to turn analyst — this group of children receives microscopic attention. Although in the larger scale of things, this small community might go unnoticed, it’s the birthplace of child psychology.

Meanwhile Vienna slides into Nazi barbarism. Vivian Heller recreates Peter’s struggle to adapt to the dangerous new world he’s living in. At 18, he escapes to England only to be deported to Canada along with other German-speaking and foreign nationals. They are eventually sent to an internment camp in Quebec, a potato farm where Nazi POWS and Jews live cheek by jowl. Here, Peter hears about the German extermination camps. He is one of the lucky ones whose life has been spared. Faced with destabilizing conditions, how is sanity to survive?

Surprisingly little has been written about the intersection of child analysis and progressive education in Vienna, or about the internment of Jewish refugees in Canada during World War II. Vivian Heller has been able to provide an inside account of both of these moments in history thanks to the rich materials that her father left in her hands. For the early chapters of her book, she’s drawn on her father’s case history with Anna Freud; interviews with his schoolmates and teachers; unpublished diaries and correspondence involving crucial figures of the Vienna school, including the Freuds, the Burlinghams, and Erik Erikson. For the later chapters, she’s drawn on her father’s unpublished internment diary. Bringing together themes of trauma, psychoanalysis, exile and immigration, Analysis and Exile:  Boyhood, Loss and the Lessons of Anna Freud is a story for our times.

Vivian Heller is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. She received her PhD in English Literature and Modern Studies from Yale University. She is the author of Joyce, Decadence, and Emancipation, which won the Choice Book Award, and a history of the building of the New York subway, The City Beneath Us. She has published essays and short stories in The Georgetown Review, Confrontation, Bomb, Fence and elsewhere. She has taught at Bennington, Barnard and Bard Colleges, and is currently a lecturer in the Columbia University’s Program in Narrative Medicine and a writing consultant at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Nick Midgley is Professor of Psychological Therapies with Children and Young People at UCL and the Anna Freud Centre, London. He is the author of Reading Anna Freud (Routledge, 2012).

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