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Hanna Segal has a special place in the hearts of North American psychoanalysts. When ego psychology was at its height, the ideas of Melanie Klein were readily dismissed as ‘id mythology’ (Rapaport and Gill, 1958). However, as the voices of a small number of local Kleinians were reinforced by the usefulness of Kernberg's conceptualisations in relation to borderline patients, by Racker's organising ideas on countertransference and by Bion's conceptualisation of group process, North American analysts became increasingly curious about Klein.
Klein's work fitted badly within the North American ethos for two reasons. Her vision of humans as engaged with largely destructive forces, poorly managed through primitive bodily fantasies, and defences that were most evident in psychotic individuals, held little appeal for the therapeutically driven and optimistic North American sensibility. Her writing combined the worst of Freud's punditry, with little of its grace and none of its humour. It put off an audience who found it easy to find fault, noting how Klein's patients' productions sometimes seemed to serve as little more than a projective screen for Mrs. Klein's fantasies. The same audience faulted Klein for lacking a scientific rigour that they rarely demanded of other psychoanalytic writers.
Here Hanna Segal came to the rescue. Segal's Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (Segal, 1973) married Kleinian ideas with Anglo-Saxon clarity. Readers nodded approvingly, thinking ‘That makes sense,’ and felt more at ease with what had been obscure and discomforting. The major Kleinian themes of fantasy, primitive defence, developmental positions and the death instincts were described in a way that let us engage and understand them. Segal put little weight on the Kleinian timetable of development, thus allowing readers to focus on issues of psychological process rather than improbable constructions of infants' psychological lives.
Even so, a centrepiece of the Kleinian view, the dea