Peter Heller, currently a professor of German and Comparative Literature in the United States, entered analysis with Anna Freud when he was nine years of age. The analysis took place from 1929 to 1932 in Vienna during an important period in the history of child analysis as well as that of psychoanalysis proper. And this was in the shadow of an emerging Nazism in Europe.

Anna Freud gave Heller her notes and his drawings and writings from the analysis. He later got her permission to use them in a book. His book was originally published in German in 1983. Anna Freud died in October 1982. This translated edition has been revised by the author.

In his prefatory remarks, Heller notes that it was Anna Freud