It has been suggested that it was 'Helene's tendency to love by identifying herself with the object, then experiencing that love as betrayed and running to the next object ... she herself explored in her various studies on the "as if" personality'. Indeed, Lisa Appignanesi has written that 'her memoir sometimes fills one with the sense that she experienced her own existence to be an "as if" — living her life first "as if" a socialist in her identification with Lieberman; "as if" a conventional wife with Felix; "as if" a mother ... then "as if" a psychoanalyst in the identification with Freud'.