Person
Paula Heimann
German-British analyst whose 1950 paper recast countertransference as an instrument of research.
Ideas
- 1950 reworked Countertransference
Recasts countertransference as an instrument of research into the patient’s unconscious.
Influence
Lineage
- supervised Hanna Segal
Paula Heimann was one of Segal's first supervisors during her training at the British Psychoanalytical Society.
Conflict
Affinity
- 1955 collaborated with Melanie Klein
Heimann co-edited New Directions in Psycho-Analysis (1955) with Klein and Money-Kyrle. The collection was published for Klein's seventieth birthday.
- collaborated with Susan Isaacs
Isaacs and Heimann wrote the chapter 'Regression' together for Developments in Psycho-Analysis (1952), the joint book of the Kleinian group.
Works
- 1952
Developments in Psycho-Analysis
A collection of papers by Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann, Susan Isaacs and Joan Riviere, edited by Riviere with a preface by Ernest Jones and published by the Hogarth Press in 1952. The publisher presents it as a survey of the advances in psychoanalytic knowledge that came from Klein's work, whose main discoveries concern the earliest phases of mental life. Its central thesis is that unconscious feeling and impulse, called phantasy, is the source of all human behaviour, however much it is changed on its way into outward action or conscious thought. On this account Freud first stated the idea but left problems open, and Klein's steady attention to unconscious phantasy brought them nearer to a solution. After a general introduction, the chapters treat psychical conflict in earliest infancy (Riviere), the nature and function of phantasy (Isaacs), introjection and projection in early infancy, regression (Heimann and Isaacs), the emotional life of the infant, the observation of young infants' behaviour, anxiety and guilt, schizoid mechanisms (Klein), and the life and death instincts. Several began as papers of the Controversial Discussions or in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. The book is addressed to students of psychoanalysis, workers in related medical fields, child psychologists and the informed lay public.
- 1955
New Directions in Psycho-Analysis is a collection edited by Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann and Roger Money-Kyrle and published by Tavistock Publications in London in 1955 to mark Klein's seventieth birthday. It gathers original papers by Klein, her close colleagues and pupils, and others influenced by her ideas, and its subtitle names the theme that joins them: the bearing of the conflicts of infancy on the patterns of adult behaviour. The first part holds clinical and theoretical papers; the second applies Kleinian ideas beyond the consulting room, to art, literature, society and ethics. Klein herself contributes two papers: "The Psycho-Analytic Play Technique", and "On Identification", which reads Julian Green's novel If I Were You as a study of projective identification. The book was reprinted by Karnac in 1993.
Gallery
Dinner for Melanie Klein's 70th birthday at Kettner's, London, 1952, with Paula Heimann seated among Klein's colleagues, including Ernest Jones, Joan Riviere, Donald Winnicott, James Strachey and Michael Balint; photographer unknown
References
- On Counter-Transference1950Evidence for a relation
- Developments in Psycho-Analysis1952Evidence for a relation
- The Nature and Function of Phantasy1948Evidence for a relation
- New Directions in Psycho-Analysis: The Significance of Infant Conflict in the Pattern of Adult Behaviour1955Evidence for a relation