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This is a collection of twenty-four papers written by Paula Heimann over a period of thirty-eight years, starting with her Membership paper of 1939/1942 and ending in 1979/1980 with a paper on her responses to being with a child. She herself was in the process of selecting the papers for publication at the time of her death in 1982. The work of selecting and editing has been completed by Margret Tonnesmann, who adds her own illuminating comments and introduces each chapter with a note about its original appearance. There are six papers which appear in English for the first time. The reader is able to explore and follow Heimann's development as a thinker, clinician, and psychoanalyst, through what were clearly difficult and stormy periods, to her emergence as an individual in her own right—being herself, which I hope all psychoanalysts seek for themselves and their patients. This point is made by Pearl King in her introductory personal memoir of Heimann, in which she recalls she shattering effect within the British Society of Heimann's withdrawal from the Klein group in 1955.
Heimann was a very interesting, influential figure in the history of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. She moved from the classical Freudian world of Berlin and a personal analysis with Reik, to a long and deep involvement with the concepts of Melanie Klein at a time when Klein was fighting for the acceptance of her new and challenging ideas and when both women were refugees from Germany. However, Heimann did not stop there. She seems to have accepted British empiricism, and was always prepared to learn from her clinical work and her personal observations. From this basis, the explored and developed her own thoughts in her particular areas of interest—sublimation and creativity, the innate ego, narcissism, the very earliest nature of the infant's undifferentiated self-other experience, destructive impulses, transference, and, of course, countertransference. This collection of her papers allo