Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

by Hanna Segal, edited by Nicola Abel-Hirsch, London, Routledge and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 2007, 280 pp., £21.99 (paperback).

What relevance has psychoanalysis today in the post-September 11 world, with the rise of fundamentalism and the accompanying certainty of a single ‘Truth’? Dr Segal clearly sees a role for psychoanalysis in all of this. She suggests ‘From the humane (including psychoanalytic) point of view we are led as citizens to struggle with the unending task of exposing lies and striving for the preservation of sane human values’ (p. 45).

In Dr Segal's obituary of Melanie Klein (written together with Rosenfeld and Bion, 1961) she wrote ‘All scientific work has as its aim to see life “as it is”. The peculiarity of psychoanalysis lies in our belief that such an aim and its steady pursuit are restorative’. This emphasis on truth and, more importantly, how it is acquired (or not), links together many of the papers in this book. Yesterday, today and tomorrow presents a generous slice of the work of Dr Segal – both chronologically and in breadth. As someone who has not read a lot of her work, I approached it with a bit of trepidation – would I be able to appreciate it without having read her earlier work? In brief I did – Dr Segal's writing is lucid and generous – those new to her thinking are welcomed in and get a tour de force of ideas – bracing yes, but also embracing.

The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 contains the main papers, dating from 2000–2006. Part 2 covers Dr Segal's contributions to symposia, conferences and occasional writings dating from 1972–2000, and includes sections on models of the mind, psychoanalytic technique, on Klein and Bion.

In the first paper of the book ‘Interpretation of dreams, 100 years on’ (2000) Dr Segal distinguishes between dreaming in psychotic and non-psychotic functioning. She believes that in psychotic functioning, there is a failure of symbolization and the dreams fulfil the function of evacuation of psyc