Vivian Heller - Analysis and Exile: Boyhood, Loss, and the Lessons of Anna Freud

Vienna, 1920s

W HEN my father was a little boy in Vienna, he told Anna Freud this dream:

He is walking on the rim of the white gravel path that leads around the oval pond in the upper part of the Belvedere Gardens. The birds are singing, the sun is out; his hands are in his pockets, hes whistling to himself. Suddenly he becomes aware of a distant rumbling that seems to be coming from the lower part of the garden. He looks down the path and doesnt see anything at first. Then a blueblack machine with a brilliant array of handles and shafts comes into sight; it is flattening the gravel, making it level and smooth. The machine is heading straight towards him; he tries to get up off the path onto the soft green grass, but even though its only a matter of a few inches, he cant lift his feet. The machine comes closer and closer, finally catching him up and pressing him with its huge rods and shafts. He calls out for help as loud as he can, but no one comes to rescue him. There is nothing he can do; the machine grinds him up.

Night after night, this dream kept coming back, so that he was afraid to fall asleep. But sleep always caught up with him in the end, no matter how hard he tried to resist. Sometimes he woke up in the kitchen, face-down on the stone floor; other times, he woke up in a bath of ice-cold water. He knew that he had been screaming because his voice was hoarse. Sometimes there were bruises on his arms and legs.

Anna Freud told my father that she knew something about dreams, and that by putting their heads together, they could probably make his dream go away. And so a conversation began that lasted for the next four years, and that played itself back to him for the rest of his life.

In the preface to his case history, which he published when he was 63 years old, my father wrote that he was brought up in a left-wing liberal, capitalist avant-garde style. Culture had taken the place of religion in his family; he remembered being brought to Seders at his grandfathers house, but these occasions had felt a little like funerals, awkward and embarrassing.

At the time of his dream, his father Hans was taking his doctorate in economics and running the family business. Heller Candy was as famous in Vienna as Nestl or Schraffts; the factory took up several city blocks, with a giant smokestack, a vast courtyard, labyrinthine interiors, and an underground storage vault known by the workers as the Catacombs. The candies that poured out of the factorys gates were miniature works of art. Simple sugar took on a lavish variety of forms pink grapefruit slices, translucent pears, pinkgold peaches, garnet-red raspberries, purple grapes; browngold walnuts, stamped with the company crown; light-gold honeycombs, with their own bees; black licorice mountain flowers; pastel-colored chocolates in the shape of seashells, butterflies, and swords; dark chocolate in the shape of pianos, flutes, and violins; liqueur-filled chocolate bottles, with labels that said Amaretto or Kirsch or Cointreau: chocolate walking sticks, chocolate mushrooms, chocolate stags, chocolate dwarves, chocolate mountain huts, chocolate dredls and chocolate Christmas stars (