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.
Julia Segal's aim-is to provide “professionals and the wider general public” with an introduction to Kleinian ideas — “a psycho-analytic approach to understanding ourselves”. As far as I am aware there is no other book that addresses itself in this way to a non-analytic audience.
The author takes the concept of phantasy as her central theme and, having looked at phantasy itself, sets out to explore, in a series of chapters, how our unconscious phantasy life can affect our view of the world and how we react in various settings: in our Family Life, at Work, in Relationships and so on. This constitutes the bulk of the book.
She is clearly well versed in Kleinian ideas and her account is thorough and systematic. It is also copiously illustrated with examples from her own experience which help bring to life what can otherwise be quite difficult concepts. The examples taken from everyday life are particularly helpful and quite a few of these involve children and have the advantage that they might encourage the reader to take children's ideas and feelings more seriously and thoughtfully. The examples from her own counselling practice were less satisfactory, some were too sketchy to be convincing, others rather too “neat”. They give the impression that simply being able to name the phantasy that is operative can bring an instant resolution of whatever the problem may be. They thereby leave the non-analytic reader with a misleading sense of the analytic process.
One risk with an introductory work of this kind is that the reader may feel tempted to go in for do-it-yourself analysis, misapplying half digested ideas. Julia Segal warns the reader against just such an eventuality but she fails to make it sufficiently clear how the insights she is offering can be applied without falling into this trap and my feeling is that the overall effect of the book will be to encourage the reader into precisely this error. Part of the difficulty, I think, stems from the fact that the author has