Image Credit: Ernst Kassowitz
Join us for a book presentation of Vivian Heller’s book Analysis and Exile (Confer Books, Ltd., 2022), followed by a conversation between the author and Professor Maura Spiegel of Columbia University.
About the book:
The book tells the story of the childhood and youth of Vivian Heller’s Jewish father, Peter Heller, who was one of the first children to be psychoanalyzed by Vienna-born pioneer child psychologist Anna Freud. He was also 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 Fascism and he is forced to navigate an increasingly dangerous world. At the age of 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.