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I have never met Hanna Segal nor seen her talk or teach in person. After reading several of her books and this volume of essays collected in her honor, I wish I had. She emerges from her writing and through others' descriptions as a remarkable person, thinker, and clinician. She is said to have a lively sense of humor. I hope she reads with amusement that “in 1994 she was awarded the Sigourney Weaver prize for her outstanding contribution to psychoanalysis” (p. ix). Weaver is, of course, an actress whose career includes the movie, “Alien,” a science-fiction thriller that features, in a memorable scene, an alien creature bursting forth from the body of an earthling—the very embodiment of a persecutory internal object! Later, in a lovely essay on Segal's life and work, David Bell informs us that she was awarded the Sigourney award (set up by the Mary S. Sigourney Trust) in 1992.
Segal's thinking has its greatest value in the illumination of clinical matters. In this spirit, Bell has assembled a set of contributions that is truly a gift to working clinicians. There is a wealth of clinical material in these essays, often describing work with very troubled patients (Segal herself used classical technique in her analyses of psychotic patients). Some of the work described was