You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
On the face of it, Hanna Segal's new book consists of eight chapters, devoted to several different though clearly related topics, of which some, such as dreams, would in a classical perspective be regarded as of more central psychoanalytic interest than others, such as the artistic impulse, which would be relegated to applied psychoanalysis. In these chapters the different topics are taken to differing degrees of depth or elaboration, but in each case there is some supplementation or revision, amounting perhaps to no more than a telling change of emphasis in the author's known views or existing formulations. In all these respects, Dream, Phantasy and Art bears a striking resemblance to Freud's New Introductory Lectures.
Viewed in this light, Dream, Phantasy and Art has the value of the accumulated points that Segal makes, all of which are presented in that lean, taut style which she has made her own. Occasionally, it is true, the chapters show the signs of not having been written, or perhaps of not having been conceived, at a single stretch with the result that a particular point, instead of being made once decisively, is attempted several times and each time in a less than fully articulated fashion. But such departures from the normally forceful style of argumentation are rare, and at every turn in the narrative Segal has at her disposal case-material with precisely the right illustrative charge.
In Chapter I Segal takes up a suggestion already to be found in her earlier book, Delusion and Artistic Creativity, that the dream-work, which for Freud was the output of certain highly specific principles of mental functioning, might fruitfully be regarded as a special case of the far broader and presumably more improvisatory activity of working through. Here the point is made more explicit, and this allows Segal, in Chapter V, to make use of it in contrasting normal dreaming and the dream as this figures in the life of the psychotic. The psychotic is unable to work t