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In this brief book, Hanna Segal offers readers an eloquent discussion of the centrality of unconscious fantasy to art, imagination, creativity, and the aesthetic response. Along the way, she illuminates many interesting currents of thought in contemporary Kleinian theory and practice, expands her earlier work on dreams, fantasy, and symbolism,1 and discusses and masterfully synthesizes formulations of Freud, Klein, and Bion. As Betty Joseph notes in her Introduction, this book cannot be categorized as only theoretical, clinical, or applied (p. xi). Rather, each of these perspectives is an essential, interconnected component of the book itself.
Segal begins her study with Freud's view of the dream as the "royal road" to the understanding of the unconscious, but quickly moves via Klein to a conception of the unconscious structured by a complex organization of wishes and defenses firmly rooted in object relations. It is the latter, existing from the very beginning of life, which give rise to an inner world of unconscious fantasy that is "the matrix of our mental structure and life" (p. 25). Freud2 saw unconscious fantasy as a relatively late addition to mental functioning that was highly organized, referred mainly to whole objects, and was comparable in structure to dreams, symptoms, and parapraxes. In contrast, Segal (and the Kleinians) views unconscious fantasy as a core, primary activity of the mind; a direct, albeit unconscious, expression of instincts and impulses; a constant and universal phenomenon of psychic functioning that is active from the very start of mental life. Thus, for Freud, an unconscious fantasy was a mental