In his foreword to this work, Clifford Yorke—until recently the director of the Anna Freud Centre—tells us that it is an outgrowth of the 80th-birthday celebrations for Ilse Hellman held at the British Psycho-Analytical Society and the Anna Freud Centre in London. One of Ilse Hellman's colleagues, Riccardo Steiner, suggested that a book including some of her unique contributions to the psychoanalysis of children and adolescents—most of which have been published in professional journals, especially in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, between 1951–1983—would represent a broader and more permanent tribute.

The opening article is an interview with Riccardo