Psychoanalysis, Literature and War: Papers 1972-1995. Hanna Segal, edited and introduced by John Steiner. London and New York:  Routledge, 1997.  178 pp.

Divided into two sections, the major one on clinical psychoanalysis and the other on literature and politics, the book is a collection of wonderful articles written over a period of twenty years. All have been revised for this collection, and all of them could be useful reading for clinicians who work with preoedipal patients.

Segal, pioneer of the “British” school, follower and interpreter of Melanie Klein, is also recognized as a respected psychoanalyst in her own right. She has been most interested in working with those patients considered narcissistic and/or emotionally regressed to infantile levels. As Steiner points out, Hanna Segal's writing ably elaborates two inter-related themes: the “clinical usefulness of the concept of the death instinct” and of the “relationship between phantasy and reality.” These themes are given very original treatment in the book and point us toward an understanding of many other ideas put forth by Segal herself and other members of the “British” school, such as projective identification, depressive position, paranoid-schizoid position, ideal objects, and persecutors.

Although this reviewer believes that the entire book is well worth reading, two of the articles stand out as major contributions to psychoanalytic literature. The first is “On the Clinical Usefulness of the