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This is the first of two volumes of collected papers — many of which are previously published — edited by David Bell to celebrate the life and work of Hanna Segal, one of the most influential psychoanalysts of our day. In her foreword, Irma Pick describes Segal's ‘incise clarity of mind’, and refers to her ‘fierce loyalty to the people and ideas that she cares about’. It is for these qualities of reason and passion that Segal commands such enormous affection and respect, and it is these that gave Bell the tide for the book.
In his excellent introduction, Bell brings to life Segal's pragmatic realism and punchy style of delivery. I particularly enjoyed his description of the meeting at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, in which a speaker had suggested that the Society should go along with a situation in which we would be getting ninety-five per cent of what we wanted, and should not be bloody-minded about the other five per cent. Segal replied by saying that it depended on the five per cent. She went on to describe a patient who had met and wanted to marry a man who was kind, intelligent, shared her cultural interests, and so on. There was only one small problem — he was impotent. ‘If,’ said Segal, ‘the five per cent is the balls of the matter, then leaving it out is self-castration!’ Bell also gives an interesting short biography of Segal's life, and a very useful, detailed, and thorough overview of her work.
Bell describes truthfulness as the hallmark of Segal's work. He quotes the lines of Samuel Johnson used by Segal, Bion and Rosenfeld in their joint obituary of Klein:
Whether to see life as it is will offer us much consolation I know not; but the consolation which is gained from truth, if any there be, is solid and durable; that which may be derived from error must be, like its original fallacious and fugitive.
It is this capacity, of knowing what is really there internally and externally, a capacity which involves facing separation, loss and guilt, that Segal cons