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Hanna Segal is perhaps best known as a close collaborator of Melanie Klein, and as an author of several books about Klein and her work. She is also well known for her theories on symbol formation, which arose in her psychoanalytic treatment of patients with psychosis; it was in this vein, as a former art therapist involved in working with schizophrenia, that I first encountered her work. However what Quinodoz aims to do in this new book is illustrate some of the ways in which Segal has been tremendously influential in her own right, and not just as one of Melanie Klein's followers.
The book takes the form of a series of interviews conducted by the author with Hanna Segal, alongside interviews with psychoanalysts who have been influenced by Segal's ideas, accompanied by a précis of the main clinical and theoretical papers she has written. The richness of this editorial approach allows the reader to meet Hanna Segal in a multitude of ways, firstly as a person, and secondly as a groundbreaking clinician, whose contribution to Kleinian thinking in particular and psychoanalysis in general spans many decades—from her early work on aesthetic experience, to symbol formation and psychoanalysis with schizophrenia, to later work on nuclear war and terrorism. As John Steiner comments at one stage of the book, what seems fundamental to Segal's work is the conflict between the life and death instincts on the one hand, and reality and phantasy on the other. Therefore her work on aesthetic experience, which she views as linked to the need to repair internal damaged objects, is as linked to the concept of the death instinct as her work on symbolic equation and the deadening concreteness of schizophrenia. For example, one of her original contributions was to recognize that what is annihilated is not only what is perceived, but the perceiving apparatus itself—i.e., the mind.
Her original contribution to Kleinian theory is made highly accessible by the structure of the book—especially th