You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
by Paul Roazen
What clinicians do in practice has been hard to monitor. Freud himself kept a wide (if unacknowledged) gulf between his theories and his practices. Only naive beginners should think that Freud's own written recommendations on technique can tell us much about how he actually proceeded as a therapist. Even his famous published case histories are sometimes quite at odds with what has been reconstructed of his clinical proceedings with those patients.
In this context Peter Heller's A Child Analysis with Anna Freud is both fascinating and invaluable, for he was in analysis with Anna Freud in the years 1929 to 1932, from the ages of nine to twelve. The book consists of Anna Freud's extensive notes on the case, which she drew up for a clinical presentation and a vignette that she used in her The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. Heller was an unusually precocious child, and brought to his analysis not only drawings but poems as well. He has taken all of this material and presented it to us with his retrospective associations and reconsiderations.
Heller was not just a patient of Anna Freud, but in a sense became a member of the extended psychoanalytic family. His father had been in analysis in Vienna, and he himself not only was treated by Anna Freud, but attended the experimental school that she, along with her intimate friends Dorothy Burlingham and Eva Rosenfeld, oversaw. Peter Blos and Erik H. Erikson were among his teachers. In addition, Heller fell in love at an early age with a school chum, Dorothy Burlingham's daughter Tinky, and they were married for some years. He therefore remained in touch with both Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham for the rest of their lives, and his story becomes itself an aspect of the history of analysis.
The main reservation I have about Heller's account has to do