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Dr Segal's books to date have been about the work of Melanie Klein. This book, a collection of her own major articles written over a period of more than 25 years, is about her own work. It is a clinical book, about clinical psychoanalysis, by a practitioner who describes herself as one whose 'only speciality is psychoanalysis—a practitioner, a student and a teacher of psychoanalysis'.
As a psychoanalyst Dr Segal is steeped in the developments within psychoanalysis associated with Melanie Klein. The articles show how she has employed these developments, and how she has contributed to them her own independent thought and intellectual depth. Above all, the writing is supported by clinical examples which display how warm humanity can be expressed not only in rigorous adherence to psychoanalytic technique but by means of that technique.
The articles can be grouped naturally into three main topics: psychoanalytic technique, schizophrenia and schizoid mechanisms, and normal and pathological mental processes.
With respect to technique of psychoanalysis, Dr Segal attacks a number of critical questions which continue to inform debates upon the process of analysis: the nature of transference and its role in interpretation; the relationship between analysis of symbolism and analysis of defences; the impact of unresolved anxieties from earliest infancy (especially the paranoid anxieties) and how these show in the transference; insight and the curative factors in analysis; at what stage in an analysis should interpretive work begin; and the constructive use of countertransference.
Dr Segal stands clearly and unequivocally with those who would argue that there are two essential features which characterize psychoanalytic therapy: the analysis of transference, and the development during treatment of insight into the play of unconscious forces in the patient's behaviour. It is by means of the analysis and interpretation to the patient of the unconscious processes expressed in and