Discussion of Hanna Segal's Article, Delusion and Artistic Creativity: Some Refiections on Reading William Golding's The Spire

In attempting a review of Hanna Segal's imaginative reflections I wish first to congratulate her on the title she chose. They are indeed reflections and not much more, except insofar as they reveal a certain orientation toward psychoanalytic theory that suggests a background of study in the tent of Melanie Klein.

While several analysts with literary interests, beginning with Freud himself, have attempted to psychoanalyze an author in absentia, the exercise cannot be said to contribute much to the development of an empirical science, even though it offers the literate analyst a delightful exercise in imaginative interpretations of the author's creations and personality.

Since I have not read the whole book I shall not attempt a sally into an untried field. Leaning upon the author's own abstract of the book, and fortified to some extent by selected readings in the original text, I find it hard to agree with Dr. Segal's basic thesis that the building of the spire symbolically represents the delusion that the parents never enjoyed sexual potency, and that in his plotting of the two couples Golding is reconstructing their images as devoid of the capacity for reproductive creativity. I am inclined to think that the author might consider these assumptions an assault on his artistic integrity. I would further surmise that the author himself has an intimate connection with those inner sources of literary creativity which supply him with the archetypal images of the characters in his book.

To me the psychological core of the book is Jocelin's delusional belief that he is charged with a task that he of all men has been chosen by God to perform—in other words, that Jocelin's original “infantile omnipotence” has maintained such a hold on him that the only way it could survive would be by direct command of the Almighty. In this way he

could escape all assaults of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. Discovery that his assignment to the task came from a source which ran counter to