Article
Notes on Symbol Formation
What it shows
Melanie Klein influenced Hanna Segal
Segal built her work on Klein's theory of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions and of projective identification, and became its foremost expositor, in the Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (1964) and the intellectual biography Klein (1979).
- 1950
Hanna Segal introduced Symbolic equation
The term first appears in Segal's 1950 account of a schizophrenic patient who treated symbols as the things they stood for; 'Notes on Symbol Formation' (1957) turned it into a theory of how symbols are formed.
- 1957
Hanna Segal reworked Symbolism
Taking Ernest Jones's theory of symbolism as her starting point, Segal treated the symbol as a relation between ego, object and symbol and widened the concept beyond what is repressed: she distinguished the concrete symbolic equation of psychotic thinking from the true symbol, formed through mourning in the depressive position, on which sublimation, thought and communication depend.
- 1952
Hanna Segal developed Depressive position
Segal carried Klein's depressive position into new fields: she made the mourning and recreation of the lost object the source of artistic creation and aesthetic experience (1952), and the condition for forming true symbols as opposed to symbolic equations (1957).
- 1957
Symbolic equation derives from Projective identification
Segal explains the symbolic equation by Klein's projective identification: when it is excessive, part of the ego is identified with the object, and the symbol, a creation of the ego, is then identified with the object it stands for.
- 1957
Hanna Segal developed Projective identification
Segal used projective identification to account for disturbances of symbol formation in psychotic patients, and later, after Bion, separated its pathological form from its normal, communicative use.