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Hanna Segal is widely regarded as the chief exponent of Kleinian thought in this country, and one of the clearest exponents of Bion's early work. This book includes both expositions of Klein's and Bion's ideas, and new contributions of Segal's own, on the subjects of dream theory, disillusionment, vision, and September 11th (Papers from 2000-2006).
In the two interviews which conclude the book, we get a lively sense of what motivated the young Polish student on her arrival here in 1939. She met Fairbairn while pursuing her medical studies in Edinburgh, and he gave her two books to read: Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, and Klein's The Psychoanalysis of Children. Her choice was clear: on applying to the Institute, she insisted on waiting until Klein had a vacancy for a training analysis, despite being offered a place with Winnicott. Much can be deduced from these beginnings: the interviews reveal a strong polemical streak in arguing the case against Lacan, some aspects of feminism, and revisionist theories of homosexuality.
In the first of these papers (‘Interpretation of dreams - 100 years on’), delivered in Vienna on the centenary of Freud's famous work, she makes what I think is one of her most original contributions to classical psychoanalytic theory - characteristically by paying tribute to her eminent predecessor, but introducing a significant variation on the original theory. She holds that ‘a central part of dream work is to evolve a symbolic language’ (p. 16), and that this is a function of the ego - not necessarily for the purpose of wish-fulfilment but as a reparative endeavour in the internal world - an attempt to restore destroyed objects and aspects of oneself (p. 24). This hints at a further theme, developed later on in the book: that this struggle for representation in dreams is in the service of the reality-principle, and involves mourning and loss, rather than a gratification of the pleasure-principle.