Hanna Segal

Segal was born in Łódź in 1918 into a cultured Jewish family. Her father was a barrister and art critic. Her older sister died at the age of four, a loss that the biography published by the Melanie Klein Trust calls a great blow.

When Hanna was twelve or thirteen (her biographers differ), the family moved to Geneva, where her father edited a League of Nations publication. At sixteen she went back to Poland to finish school in Warsaw. By her late teens she had read all of Freud that was available in Polish and wanted to become an analyst. She began studying medicine at Warsaw University. Poverty and the lack of political freedom led her to join the Polish Socialist Party, and her parents had to stop her from going to fight for the Republicans in Spain. Her obituarist Bernard Roberts records that her commitment to the political left stayed with her for the rest of her life.

Her family, expelled from Switzerland, settled in Paris, and she joined them there in 1939. In 1940 they fled across France and reached Britain. Segal completed her medical studies in Edinburgh in 1943, in the wartime Polish medical school there. In Edinburgh she met Ronald Fairbairn, who told her how she could train as an analyst in London, and she had a first year of analysis with one of Klein's pupils.

In London she worked in psychiatry and played a large part in the rehabilitation of mentally ill Polish soldiers, many of them at Long Grove Hospital. She trained at the British Psychoanalytical Society, where she was analysed by Klein herself, and qualified in 1945, aged twenty-seven. Paula Heimann and Joan Riviere were among her first supervisors. She went on to train as a child analyst under the supervision of Heimann, Esther Bick and Klein. She married the mathematician Paul Segal, who died in 1996, and they had three sons.

Segal's first two papers set out the two interests she pursued for the rest of her life, creativity and psychosis. The aesthetics paper was written and presented to the British Society first, but published only in 1952. Her membership paper, Some Aspects of the Analysis of a Schizophrenic³, appeared in 1950. She later called Klein's Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms⁴ of 1946 "a bombshell and yet familiar".

With Herbert Rosenfeld, Wilfred Bion and Betty Joseph, she belonged to a small group of Klein's pupils who met in a seminar Klein ran, and she worked with Rosenfeld and Bion on the analysis of psychosis, including schizophrenia. She became a training analyst in 1952. Her analysands included candidates of the Society, psychotic patients, and artists whose creativity had become blocked. Among those she supervised was Donald Meltzer, on both child and adult cases.

She was President of the British Psychoanalytical Society from 1977 to 1980 and twice Vice-President of the International Psychoanalytical Association. In 1987 she was appointed to the Freud Memorial Chair at University College London, as visiting professor for 1987–88. In 1992 she received the Mary Sigourney Award. She died in London on 5 July 2011.

The term symbolic equation first appears in Segal's 1950 account of a schizophrenic patient who treated symbols as if they were the things they stood for. In Notes on Symbol Formation⁵ (1957) she turned this clinical observation into a theory of how symbols are formed.

Her starting point was Ernest Jones's The Theory of Symbolism⁶, for which only what is repressed is symbolised. Segal treated the symbol instead as a relation among three terms, the ego, the object and the symbol, and widened the concept of symbolism beyond what is repressed. In the symbolic equation the substitute is not felt to stand for the original object but to be identical with it, and so it is treated as concretely as the thing it replaces. The true symbol represents the object rather than being equated with it.

Segal explained the difference through Klein's concepts. Where projective identification is excessive, part of the ego is identified with the object, and the symbol, which is a creation of the ego, is then identified with the object it stands for. The true symbol arises in the depressive position, when the lost object can be mourned and given up. Sublimation, thinking and communication depend on such symbols, and under stress symbolic functioning can regress to equation. Roberts judged that by separating primitive from developed symbolism the paper clarified how disturbed states of mind come about.

In her later papers, collected in Dream, Phantasy and Art⁷ (1991), Segal followed Bion. She traced disturbed symbol formation to pathological rather than merely excessive projective identification, separated that pathological form from the normal, communicative use of projective identification, and linked her theory of symbols to Bion's alpha function and beta elements.

A Psycho-Analytical Approach to Aesthetics carried Klein's depressive position into the theory of art. In Segal's account the artist faces an inner world that is felt to lie in ruins. The artist reassembles its fragments and, in the work, recreates the lost object, so that reparation becomes the core of artistic creation. The beholder shares in that mourning and recreation. Roberts summed up the paper as putting the capacity to mourn at the centre of both the artist's work and the audience's aesthetic response, and called it perhaps the most original attempt at a psychoanalytic understanding of creativity.

In the same paper Segal gave ugliness a place in art, as the expression of good objects breaking up into persecutory ones. She also held that the artist needs an acute sense of reality in two directions, toward inner reality and toward the medium. She returned to these themes in Dream, Phantasy and Art and in papers on novels by Joseph Conrad, Patrick White and William Golding. Roberts notes that she felt a kinship with Conrad, a fellow Pole who had adopted English.

The Melanie Klein Trust biography describes her lifelong project as the study of how creative and psychotic functioning are related. It notes that she often thought in pairs: symbols and symbolic equations, creativity and delusion, the life and death instincts, phantasy and reality.

Segal held that psychoanalytic insight into destructiveness and denial could inform political debate. Roberts calls her paper Silence is the Real Crime one of the most important psychoanalytic contributions to the debate about nuclear weapons. In her political writing she drew on the contrast between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions: an identified enemy helps to ward off the pain of depression. She examined the sane and the psychotic forces at work in nuclear proliferation and war, and later the symbolic and psychological effects of the attacks of 11 September 2001.

Her later papers were gathered in Psychoanalysis, Literature and War (1997) and in her last collection, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. The 1997 volume includes her paper on the clinical usefulness of the concept of the death instinct. The Trust biography observes that late in life her tone moved from the pioneering optimism of the early Kleinian group to determination. She continued to stress the power of the psychotic part of the personality in the patient, in the analyst's mind and in the social and political world.

Segal's two books on Klein did much to make Klein's work accessible. Roberts describes the Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein as still a standard text. It was first published in London by Heinemann in 1964 and issued in an enlarged edition in 1974. Her shorter intellectual biography, Klein⁸ (1979), appeared in the Fontana Modern Masters series. Both books rest on Klein's theory of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions and of projective identification. Klein appeared in Hebrew in 1998 from Am Oved, translated by Rubi Schoenberger, in a psychoanalysis series edited by Emanuel Berman and Ilana Shamir. Betty Joseph, quoted in the Trust biography, said that Segal understood Klein instinctively, and not only because she had been in analysis with her.

Her writing also reached readers outside psychoanalysis. After the attacks of September 2001, a passage from the aesthetics paper, on the moment when the world within us is destroyed and dead and loveless, became, without her knowledge, the rallying call of the World Trade Center Mural Project. In 2006, the year of Freud's 150th anniversary, she appeared on the BBC programme Desert Island Discs. There she said that only in the most severe mental illness was nature the overwhelming factor.

Segal's early papers appeared in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. Some Aspects of the Analysis of a Schizophrenic (1950) introduced the symbolic equation. A Psycho-Analytical Approach to Aesthetics (1952) set out her theory of art. Notes on Symbol Formation (1957) gave the full theory of symbolic equation and true symbol.

Her books include Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (1964) and Klein (1979). Her collected papers appeared as The Work of Hanna Segal in 1981 and were issued again in 1986 by Free Association Books under the subtitle Delusion and Artistic Creativity and Other Psycho-analytic Essays. Her later books are Dream, Phantasy and Art (1991), Psychoanalysis, Literature and War (1997) and Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.