Foreword

All writing must to some extent reflect the personality of its author, and this book is no exception. It reflects the breadth of Hanna Segal’s interests and her capacity to follow and explore their nature, and yet it is based in a strict theoretical framework, which she herself has extended and applied. Throughout her work, and indeed her living, one can see the interconnecting of these elements, her ability to extend boundaries and enjoy it.

She was born in Poland in 1918. Her mother was a woman of character and stamina, and a beauty. Her father was a man of wide interests; when aged twenty, while studying law in Paris, he wrote a history of French sculpture in the nineteenth century, which is still considered a classic in Poland. He was a barrister in Warsaw, but in the early thirties emigrated to become editor of an international newspaper in Geneva. Hanna Segal was twelve when the family left Poland, but she had and has always remained deeply attached to her roots there, and, at sixteen, she persuaded her parents to let her go back to Poland, where she finished school and studied medicine. The war found her in Paris, where her parents were, and when Paris was occupied by the Nazis, following the usual war trek, she arrived in London, and went on to Edinburgh, where she resumed her studies.

She was widely read in Freud and, while in Edinburgh she discovered the work of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, and made up her mind to train with Klein. She was fortunate in finding in Edinburgh Dr David Matthews, who had himself been analysed by Klein, and he offered to take her into analysis while she was waiting to return to London. She came to London, was accepted for training by the British Psycho-Analytical Society and for analysis by Melanie Klein, qualifying in 1945. It was soon after this that we first met, so that our friendship has extended over more than forty years. By the time she was thirty-two, she was a Training Analyst.

These various elements emerge and are refle