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We are prone to separate our impressions of an author's scientific work from what we know of their personal life, although as analysts we know better. Perhaps we believe this kind of isolating is scientific, but we conduct our everyday work with patients so as to combat such discontinuity in others. A veritable industry has grown up around Freud and some of the early analysts, now particularly women analysts, at least in part to counteract the tendency to segregate the product from the person and the process that produced it. Margret Tonnesmann, the editor of this selection of Paula Heimann's papers, is to be congratulated on the skilful way she has brought together the person and the product, while simultaneously conveying a sense of the personal and professional evolutionary processes underlying Heimann's work.
An Introductory Memoir by Pearl King sets a humanistic tone with cogent stories of Heimann's emigration with other analysts from Berlin to London, her initially close relationship with Melanie Klein and their subsequent break, and her courageous assertion of her own, differing views on analytic issues. Tonnesman's Introduction neatly sets out in fifteen pages Heimann's published life work divided into the topics of: The differentiation from Melanie Klein; Early development; Aggression and destruction; and Technique. I found myself frequently referring back to this tour de force to maintain a sense of the context in which the papers were written, as I read through them.
The book's title is that of the last paper written when Heimann was 80 years old, an invited response to analysts to write about how they see and relate to a child, not as a therapist but as a person. Conversational in tone, the reader is immediately engaged with a youthfully energetic mind mulling over several astute observations of children known personally to her, while they were interacting with others. Among other things, she raises questions (e.g. why are children not more disturb