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Although the book is not called, nor even subtitled, ‘Essays in honour of Hanna Segal’, it might as well be; indeed Otto Kernberg, in his Foreword, actually presents it as ‘the second of two books in honour of Hanna Segal’ (the first being Reason and Passion, also edited by David Bell). In the event, respect for Hanna Segal is just about the only thing the essays have in common, in spite of the editorial efforts of David Bell, who contributes a sizeable (22-page) Introduction, as well as an essay on Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective. The book is organized under two headings: ‘Art and Literature’ (four essays); and ‘Mind and Society’ (six). In the first group, apart from Bell on Potter, there are essays by Ronald Britton on Rilke (The Duino Elegies), Igněs Sodré on Flaubert (Madame Bovary), and John Steiner on Sophocles (Oedipus Rex). The larger section has Michael Rustin on ‘Psychoanalysis: the last modernism’; Richard Wollheim on ‘Emotion and the malformation of emotion’; Michael Feldman on ‘Pride’; Léon and Rebecca Grinberg: ‘Psychoanalytic perspectives on migration’; Pearl King on the analysis of old people (‘In the end is my beginning’ - words attributed to T.S. Eliot, although he actually wrote ‘In my end is my beginning’, even more appropriate); and A.A. Mason: ‘A psychoanalyst's look at a hypnotist: a study of folie à deux’.
Although the reviewer, faced with such variety, is obliged to offer in fairness a comment on each of the essays, some general remarks are possible and, indeed, as will soon be clear, essential. The first concerns the section ‘Art and Literature’. Whenever psychoanalysis is applied to a literary work, it is important to ask how far it illuminates the work (literature is, after all, not a body of ready-made evidence or case material). For the essays offered here, the answer varies between ‘hardly at all’ and ‘a great deal’. Igněs Sodré's account of Madame Bovary (‘Death by daydreaming’) has valuable things to say about daydreaming, but i