"When 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 ... Then a blue-black machine with a brilliant array of handles and shafts comes into sight... The machine comes closer and closer...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."

Analysis and Exile: Boyhood, Loss, and the Lessons of Anna Freud is the story of the childhood and youth of Peter Heller, one of the first children to be psychoanalyzed by Anna Freud and one of the 20 students invited to attend her experimental school in 1920s Vienna. While Anna Freud tries to teach him how to overcome his fears, Peter's native Vienna slides into Fascist barbarism and he is forced to navigate an increasingly dangerous world.

When he is eighteen, he flees to England only to be deported to Canada, where he is interned as a German-speaking foreign national; here Jewish refugees and Nazi P.O.W.'s live cheek by jowl. To tell this story, Vivian Heller draws on a wealth of primary sources, including her father's case history and his internment diary, using novelistic techniques to bring the past alive.