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The “classical analyst” is torn between admiration and protest while reading Hanna Segal's excellent paper on “Melanie Klein's Technique.” My admiration goes to the clinical material and succinct illustrations of the work done and to descriptions of the “first sessions” which show great sensitivity and quick understanding; however, I do not see any differences between Dr. Segal's approach to the material and a Freudian point of view. When the patient speaks of her violent father, I would think of her fear and her hope to be attacked in the same way again. I would interpret “at the level at which the patient's anxiety is active,” which, however, is not necessarily the “level of the patient's maximum unconscious anxiety” as Hanna Segal postulates.
She talks about the analysis of persecutory anxieties and of the defenses against them and says, “if the analyst is very idealized, he will be particularly watchful for the appearance of bad figures in the patient's extra-analytic life and take every opportunity of interpreting them as split-off bad aspects of himself.” The split transference is certainly a frequent occurrence in most analyses, as is the idea that the bad figure may be a projection of the badness of the patient. The Freudian analyst is familiar with the manipulating patient who can provoke people in his environment to express his own feelings. The projective identifications might be seen as a reversal of roles, as when the schizophrenic patient turned the tables on the analyst-mother.
I would probably agree with the handling of most of the clinical examples. Segal says one has “to interpret in detail introjective identification with the rejecting mother and the projective identification of the rejected child part of himself, identifying and describing its feelings and interpreting the detail of the phantasy to illustrate how this part is projected.” This looks like a reconstruction which one might use as a technical means to help the patient understand or reme