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Hanna Segal has long been known as an interpreter of the work of Melanie Klein and for her own work on symbolism, dreams, and aesthetics. In this volume, Segal brings together her thinking in these areas, drawing on the work of Freud, Klein, and Bion, into a fresh integration which brings new clarity to each of the topics and their interrelation, and hints at the breadth of the usefulness of her thinking in both clinical and applied psychoanalysis.
The goals of the book are manifold and ambitious. To begin with, Segal seeks to demonstrate the ubiquitous and central quality of unconscious fantasy in mental life and the myriad ways in which such fantasies find expression. Here, she draws a distinction between the view of unconscious fantasy elaborated by Freud and that of the Kleinian tradition from which she operates, emphasizing the position that unconscious fantasy is an earlier phenomenon and operates on a deeper level than Freud originally believed. She carefully differentiates among various manifestations of unconscious fantasy (dreams, daydreams, artistic creations, imagination, and play), particularly with respect to the subject's relation to reality in each of these states.
She then sets forth a complex and sophisticated model of the mind of the creative artist and the nature of the creative impulse, as well as the psychopathology of these phenomena, touching on aspects