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In this book Dr Segal expounds ideas that she has been working on for forty years. Those who know her published work will recognise many of her arguments, and indeed some of her clinical examples. And yet this book is much more than a re-working of her previous papers; it is an attempt to integrate and to form into a coherent whole those aspects of psychoanalytic theory and its application that she has studied for all of her professional life.
She writes in her introduction that her aim is to make her book interesting enough for psychoanalysts and yet accessible to the more general reader. With this aim in mind, she begins by describing Freud's theory of dreams, and then moves on to the theme of unconscious phantasy in order to acquaint the reader with the concepts and the subject matter that she will develop in future chapters. I found these first two chapters rather condensed and despite the lucidity and the excellent use of clinical examples, I think they would be rather hard work for a general reader with little background knowledge. They are invaluable to those who already have some grounding in the concepts, in that her strength is in her ability to integrate the concepts, to show how they interrelate, and to demonstrate how she has developed them to form the bedrock out of which come her orientations to her clinical work and to her understanding of the production of art.
Chapter 3 is based on her seminal 1957 paper on symbolism, and is followed by a development of her 1979 postscript to that paper. In this she uses Bion's concept of the container and the contained to understand more deeply the development of a capacity to symbolise. And she goes further in linking this to the early Oedipal situation and its working through. Throughout, her emphasis is on the psychic work that such working through involves and on the mental capacities that are its consequence. Segal demonstrates the difference between a mind that is capable of symbolic communication and alpha fu