Background
Their daughter Mirza was born that same year.
Their daughter Mirza was born that same year.
After studying medicine in Königsberg, Berlin, and Frankfurt, Paula Klatzko took and passed her Staatsexamen (state exams) in Breslau. Together they went to Heidelberg where she trained to be a psychiatrist from 1924–1927. She wrote her doctoral dissertation in 1925.
In 1927, the Heimann family moved to Berlin, where she began her psychoanalytic training under Theodor Reik in 1929.
In 1934 Heimann became Melanie Klein"s secretary. In 1935 they started working together on analysis and became close associates.
She passed the state medical examination in Edinburgh in 1938. Her article On counter-transference, presented at the Psychoanalytical Congress in 1949 in Zurich, led to a rift with the Kleinian group of analysts because she presented a different view of the importance of countertransference.
Melanie Klein saw it only as a problem of the therapeutic process.
Paula Heimann, however, saw the emotional reaction of the therapist to their patient as an important tool for the exploration of the latter"s unconscious. She then turned to the Independents group and was Margarete Mitscherlich"s analyst during 1958-1959. Alexander Mitscherlich also underwent training analysis with her.
In 1933, Heimann"s husband had to leave Germany because of his political views.
That year she became a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society with her lecture A contribution to the problem of sublimation.