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What did I know about Paula Heimann before I read this collection of her essays? Only her helpful and humane papers on countertransference - though it is still surprising to me that these modest beginnings, illuminating a hitherto badly understood experience, eventually helped move countertransference into the forefront of psychoanalytic thinking.
Knowing so little, I was the more grateful for the two introductory essays. From Pearl King's Introductory Memoir: ‘Paula Heimann's quest for her own identity as a psychoanalyst’, I learnt among other interesting details that she trained in Berlin in the Freudian tradition, came to England and had a second analysis with Melanie Klein (the first was with Theodor Reik), but gradually moved away from Klein into an independent position. From editor Margret Tonnesmann I gained an account of the evolution of her views on early infantile development, on technique and on her differences from Melanie Klein. I found Tonnesmann's summary of Heimann's views on projective identification and related processes particularly valuable (pp. 12-13).