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Dr
Hanna Segal
Psychoanalysis,
Dreams, History:
an Interview with Hanna Segal
by
Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper
Introduction
This brief, informal interview with the psychoanalyst
Hanna Segal, who recently celebrated her eightieth
birthday, took place in London in April 1999. Focusing on
dreams, psychoanalysis and history, this interview and the
accompanying clinical example by her colleague Edna
O’Shaughnessy (not included on this website. [Ed.])
conclude the feature that has run across issues 48 and 49
of this journal, coinciding with the centenary of Sigmund
Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.
Together
with Susan
Budd’s article in issue 48, Segal and
O’Shaughnessy’s discussions illuminate important
developments in approach within the British school of
psychoanalysis, particularly in the Kleinian tradition,
and highlight some of the differences in technique that
mark the passage from Freud to contemporary
psychoanalysis.
Many
readers of History Workshop Journal will know of Hanna
Segal as the most prominent and lucid postwar interpreter
of the work of Melanie Klein; Segal is the author, for
instance, of the widely-read Fontana ‘Modern Master’
on Klein. Over the last fifty years,[1]
Segal’s many papers, essays and
books have explored the nature of her own psychoanalytic
experience and made important conceptual contributions,
for instance regarding the nature of unconscious phantasy,
the clinical relevance of the death instinct, and the
psychic consequences of the capacity (or lack of it) to
use symbols.
She
has investigated the wider applications of psychoanalytic
ideas in diverse fields, notably aesthetics, politics and
literature. In the 1980s she was a leading figure amongst
a group of British psychoanalysts who sought not only to
think critically about the mad 'logic' of nuclear war but
also to speak out and protest. Her paper 'Silence is the
Real Crime' (1987) bore witness both to her committedly
psychoanalytic perspective and her political passion and
involvement.[2]
Hanna Segal grew up in Poland; her family had cosmopolitan
interests and her father was an able linguist. She has
described her mother as a person of exceptional
resourcefulness, who helped pull the family through during
times of great upheaval. When Hanna was twelve, her family
moved, under difficult personal circumstances, to Geneva,
where her father took up a post as an editor of a journal.
She returned for a time to Warsaw in order to complete her
secondary education and to pursue medicine.
She
had an allegiance to socialism, but also encountered
Freud's work at an early stage. Again under pressure, her
family had to move once more, this time to Paris (her
father's role as an anti-fascist had by then made it
politically untenable for them to stay in Geneva).
Hanna herself had continued to study medicine in Poland,
but when she visited her family in Paris during the
holidays in August 1939, she found she could not return.
In 1940, in the face of the German occupation of France,
the family fled to England, crossing the Channel on board
a Polish ship. As she puts it, 'I arrived in time for the
Blitz'. She pursued medical work in Britain but by this
stage saw it as a staging post to a different end:
psychoanalytic training. She had quickly come into contact
with the pioneers of the 'object relations' tradition that
had emerged in psychoanalysis in Britain. In what was to
turn out to be a profoundly significant introduction,
Ronald Fairbairn (in Edinburgh) put Segal in touch with
Klein, with whom she had analysis, and later, supervision.
The period of Segal's arrival on the psychoanalytical
scene, soon after Freud's own death in London, was marked
by enormous ferment in the movement, with followers of
Klein, of Anna Freud and of neither in intense and
profound dispute over theoretical models, technique, and
much besides. This led to a series of formal debates in
London, between 1941 and '45; contributions were detailed,
sometimes intellectually brilliant and often deeply
acrimonious. On occasion, these highly-charged meetings
were disturbed by the real airwar going on outside. (These
illuminating 'Controversial Discussions' became readily
accessible in published form in 1991.) [3]
After
the war, several followers of Klein, amongst whom were
Herbert Rosenfeld and Hanna Segal, undertook clinical work
with very severely disturbed patients. Writings of lasting
import, for instance, on the nature of psychotic and
non-psychotic functioning, were produced by these
practitioners, as well as, notably, by Wilfred Bion
(1897-1979), whose work had long been an important point
of reference and dialogue for Segal herself, and who is
directly mentioned in the interview below.
In
1987 Segal was appointed to the newly-established Freud
professorship at University College, London. Some of the
ideas sketched in the discussion below are further
elaborated in two collections: Dream, Phantasy and Art
(1991) and Psychoanalysis Literature and War (1997).
A two-volume collection edited b y David Bell, containing
essays about or inspired by Hanna Segal's work as recently
been published: Reason and Passion, 1997, and
Psychoanalysis and Culture: A Kleinian Perspective, 1999.[4]
Notes
and References
1 A half century of publications that
began with 'Some aspects of the analysis of a
schizophrenic', International Journal of Psychoanalysis
31, 1950, pp. 268-78.
2 Hanna Segal, 'Silence is the Real
Crime', International Review of psychoanalysis 14, 1987,
pp. 3-12; reprinted in Psychoanalysis, Literature and War,
ed. John Steiner, London, 1997.
3 Ricardo Steiner and Pearl King (eds),
The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941-45, London 1991.
4 This summary draws on Bell's account of
Segal's background and intellectual contribution in his
introduction to vol. 1 of the Festschrift.
INTERVIEW
Daniel
Pick: The first thing that we wanted to explore
was the significance of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams
for psychoanalysis today. As we reach its centenary, does
its original interpretative model still provide 'the royal
road' to a new understanding of dreams and of the
unconscious in the way that Freud believed?
Hanna Segal: Yes and
no. Freud is often misquoted; he never said that the dream
is the royal road to the unconscious; but he did say that
the interpretation of the dream is the royal road to the
unconscious. In present-day analysis people vary greatly
in how much attention they pay to the dream. I belong to
those that like to work with dreams, but the whole
attitude to the dream has changed.
Freud's
great discovery was that our repressed unconscious
expresses itself in dreams and that this involves a lot of
psychic work; a whole language has to be developed in
order to have a dream; symbols have to be found and things
have to be put together. It's really quite an effort; an
unconscious psychic production of the dream which is a
working through, a working out, of experiences which are
not elaborated consciously.
In
Freud's time, this was a great discovery and it gave
direct access, in a way, to expressions of unconscious
phantasy. He would analyse dreams bit by bit and ask for
associations and sometimes go on for days. That was at the
time when he wasn't so aware of the importance of the
transference so that he could continue the same dream
because it was like a set task till the dream was
analysed.
Nowadays,
when we understand much more about the importance of the
transference and the developing relationship between the
patient and the analyst, we are also concerned with the
function of the dream. Why does the patient have this
dream and tell it to us in a particular way at a
particular time? In that way the dream is treated like any
other material. The other thing that has happened since
Freud is that we differentiate much more between the time
and type of dream, and we consider what dynamic psychic
function it performs.
Dreams
can have very different functions. Earlier I spoke of the
working through and the psychic work that comes into
dreaming, but not all dreams are of that kind. Freud spoke
of a dream as a night-time hallucination. But I think, in
fact, that not all dreams are night-time hallucinations.
Some are like that; they are felt as very concrete. They
sort of stay in the mind. Their use (I'm generalizing
here) is not to establish a communication - a dream as
communication between the unconscious phantasy and our
conscious mind - but on the contrary, to get rid of mental
content. Bion speaks of patients who treat their dream
with shame, as though they had defecated or urinated in
their beds. And in those situations dreams are not used to
elaborate symbolically and to communicate to oneself or
the analyst. They're very close to hallucination. It's
something used to get rid of our own experience, by
putting it outside.
I
once had a patient who wrote down his dreams; he had
notebooks and notebooks of them; he had an 'agenda' in the
analysis to go through his dreams. We were always years
behind his agenda. He would come and read the dream and
tell it to me and in this way it was as though the dream
had nothing to do with him. What was particularly striking
was that he was very often getting rid of more positive
parts of his psychic personality because those were the
painful ones. For instance, he was extremely fixated on
his mother; when she died, he had a lot of dreams which
were extremely moving. He put them in his little diary.
This was not a way of working through his mourning, but a
means of getting rid of it. And it comes very close to
hallucination because then dreams are used not to
elaborate a psychic reality but to get rid of it by
putting it in an image, telling it, invading the analyst's
mind with the image, not really elaborating the problem.
They are used for action - to seduce, to impress, to
frighten. So we pay much more attention not only to the
content, but also to what is the actual function that the
dream performs. I won't add more on this now because I've
written a great deal on this.
Lyndal Roper: We also
wondered whether you felt that the question of how one
should interpret dreams and what one should make of
dreams, had been particularly contentious within
psychoanalysis as you have experienced it. Or has it been
just an organic change in the way people have approached
dreams?
HS:
Well, technique has changed a great deal, at least in the
Kleinian development, and other people have also changed
very much. Freud used to give a sort of symbolic
explanation; he would translate the symbol. We don't do
that now; one might sometimes just use one fragment of the
dream that the patient has brought. We don't interpret
symbols in the same immediate automatic way. We don't have
a dictionary of symbols. One has to wait to know what this
symbol means to this patient. Also one has to be very
watchful whether it really is a symbol or whether it's
felt as a more concrete thing. Whether this is contentious
is difficult to say. I may be wrong [in generalizing]
about it because I speak from England, where there is so
much interchange [between groups] that very few people
today would analyse a dream like Freud does (asking the
patient to associate to this and to that and to the
other). Everybody is much more aware of the transference.
LR: Coming at this as
a historian, from a rather different perspective, this
raises for me the whole question of how one might think
about symbols in dreams in the past. If a symbol and the
way a symbol is used in a dream is very much part of an
individual's working through, then how might that be true
for dreams in the past? To what extent is a language of
dreams something that's shaped not just by the individual
but by a culture or a period?
HS: I think everything
is affected. Nowadays a certain type of phallic potency
would often be represented by a motorcycle. Obviously
there was a time when there were no motorcycles. New
symbols are needed all the time; also symbols are very
overdetermined. Some say that a thing can be represented
by many symbols, but the symbol has only one meaning. That
certainly isn't true and actually Freud spoke of
overdetermination. But a symbolism evolves as the object
relationships evolve. The same symbol can have very varied
meanings and come up at different times. A snake may
represent a penis at one level. It could be seen as the
wise thing or the poisonous thing. But in another sense,
it may be a poisonous breast. At still another, it may be
the baby's poisonous mouth. So you sort of work through
the symbols. Symbols carry a history with them. In fact I
would say that the view that symbols have one meaning is
the opposite of the case; probably there's nothing that
represents just one thing.
LR: There's also the
issue of the role of culture in dreaming and what role you
think it does play. Is it just that the symbols changed
depending on time?
HS: No, all sorts of
factors change. Situations change, anxieties change. Take
dreams, let's say, in adolescents confronted with endless
unemployment or confronted with a nuclear threat. We can
see not only the alteration of symbols but that certain
anxieties are more prominent in certain cultures. There's
nothing that is not influenced by our environment.
DP:
We've been asking question about dreams in history or
dreams in culture. But how much can the question be put
the other way round: how far do you see dreams as
registering or featuring changes in personal history,
relationships to the past?
HS: Yes they do, and
so does the culture. Whatever culture we have is an
outcome of past culture. The past is always with us,
that's clear, whether in dreams or in the culture. But I
don't think, as Freud did, that we have got a sort of
racial memory of things in the past. I think it's more
that the current situation and environment carry the past
to which we react.
DP: One of the points
you suggested earlier is that without close analytic work
on the dreamer as well as the dream, we know very little.
This does raise a problem for historians who might for
instance have a dream text that someone recorded in the
past, like your patient's notebook writings. We may have
an archive, even something akin to those notebooks, but no
access
psychoanalytically to the dreamer. I'm wondering how much
in your view that leads to the problem of what used to be
called 'wild analysis'. Does it not suggest that one must
be very cautious about what one could actually say if one
were to take, say, the dreams of historical figures?
HS: Speculation can be
dangerous in analysis. About dreams in history, nobody who
has any sense would say that that dream means this or that
for sure. But one might still speculate - knowing
something of an artist's history and his preoccupations.
One can have some freedom of thought here; we can
speculate, but we cannot say that because such and such
symbols were there, it means anything for sure. That's the
difference between you historians and me. For in relation
to patients, one has to be very careful, because making
mistakes costs lives as it were. On the other hand I think
one should have more freedom in reconstructing
imaginatively a biography of an artist, provided one
doesn't become autocratic about it.
DP: There are at least
two directions that one could imagine a critic taking in
relation to this whole discussion. One might be the
direction of a more historically-sceptical commentator,
who would want to challenge some of the more
universalizing claims that have been made by
psychoanalysts about dreams, symbolism, phantasy and so
forth. The other direction of critique might be from the
natural sciences today. There has been so much work on
dreams from a more empirical 'laboratory' viewpoint. From
either of these directions is there a real problem that
actually needs to be addressed by analysts or are these
simply different languages that have nothing to do with
the psychoanalytic understanding?
HS: I think criticism
which is valid and well based has to be addressed - but by
others. I do not personally go in for that kind of
documentation or debate. Regarding the physical phenomena,
as far as I know, there is nothing that really would
contradict our view. I think at some point a much greater
synthesis has to be made. But I think at the moment it's
very premature. We have to know a lot more about those
fields. And to my mind - I may be prejudiced I think we
know much more about the psychic functioning now than the
neurophysiologists and chemists know about the functioning
of the brain. I think so.
DP: But I'm interested
that, in a way, you share Freud's aspiration that one day
natural science and psychoanalysis will meet.
HS: I don't say will
take over, but will come closer. I don't think that there
is anything in analysis that contradicts natural physical
laws. You know, if I smack you and you get a redness in
your cheek it may mean an awful lot of things to you, but
the fact remains the fact. But how can a historian
criticize psychoanalysis? The historian's job, as it were,
is to describe things as they have evolved in various
areas, not to pass judgement. A historian can criticize me
if I write a biography of Freud full of mistakes. Or if I
said a certain idea appeared at a certain time and it
didn't.
DP:
During the half century in which you have been a member of
the British Society, do you think there have been major
changes in the understanding of dreams within the Kleinian
tradition and in the evolution of your own thinking?
HS: Oh yes, very much
so. Here I have to take some personal credit. I mean that
I identified the difference between concrete symbolism and
symbolism of a more depressive kind, and I differentiated
dreams in those terms. It was pushed much further by Bion
who was dealing with even more primitive elements of
concrete symbolism. So there has been a great shift in
that way.
DP: Would you also say
that close clinical attention to the psychic life of
children has transformed the broader theory of dreams in
psychoanalysis?
HS: Yes. Working with
children has taught us so much about the unconscious and
the child's phantasy. We could recognize more in dreams of
the child, and what the child felt, and what the kind of
phantasies were. We have also changed our view on
children's dreams. Freud said that children's dreams are
wish fulfilments and without any conflict. I don't think
now that analysis of children bears that out. We know that
their dreams are as complicated and show the same
mechanisms as adult ones.
DP: Perhaps we could
also ask you more personally at this point about your own
history in relation to psychoanalysis. You moved from
Poland through France to England and Scotland. How did you
first come to psychoanalysis?
HS:
From very early in adolescence I came to psychoanalysis
through reading. I read pretty well everything available,
translated into Polish or into French. Some people think
that I was influenced by Madame Sokalnicka. She was Polish,
a psychoanalyst, and a friend of my mother. But actually if
anything I would have been put off by her. I thought she was
rather neurotic! But mainly, it was through reading. I had
many incompatible interests. I was interested in literature
and art, but I was also a bit of a do-gooder. I wanted to be
of social use in the world. It was difficult to find a
profession. Analysis was an answer to my dreams, probably
because my basic interest is in people and human minds. I
went into medicine with the idea of becoming an analyst only
I didn't know how to set about it. I went to Bychowski who
later became quite well known in America. He was an analyst,
one of only two in Poland. He told me I must go to Vienna.
But I didn't want to go to Vienna, having no particular
liking for Germanic countries at all, so that was that. Then
when I was in Paris in 1939, I contacted an analyst,
Laforgue, because I knew his book on Baudelaire. He told me
he was skedaddling out of Paris which was very lucky for me
because I subsequently came to the conclusion he was bad
news in all sorts of ways.
During the first year and a half in London I was too busy
surviving. But in Edinburgh, I met Fairbairn and he told me
about the Institute, how to set about it. I am also very
grateful to Fairbairn for alerting me to certain
controversies and various other developments in the Society
- up till then I had read Freud, but not heard of Anna Freud
or of Melanie Klein. He gave me Anna Freud's The Ego and the
Mechanisms of Defence which I found one of the most boring
books I have ever read and Melanie Klein's Psychoanalysis of
Children, which was like opening a world for me.
LR: But how old were you
then?
HS: I was born in 1918
and we're speaking of Edinburgh in 1941. I was in my early
twenties.
DP: You mention
Fairbairn saying to you that there were these controversies
going on in London. That was something of an understatement
for that period!
HS: It was in the war.
It was just before the 'Controversial Discussions'. Yes, I
had no idea how acute it was and that there was such
personal enmity. I just knew about it on the basis of the
books. And it also rang bells for me immediately, I tell you
what, when we were being evacuated from Paris, we walked out
of Paris, but at some point we caught a train. And in that
train a young adolescent girl had a schizophrenic breakdown
and her parents didn't know what to do. I was a medical
student, that was my only experience and they asked me to
look after her, which I did - I also took her to hospital.
She was talking non-stop and the thing that stuck in my mind
was that she was screaming 'I've lost it, I shat out my
lover in the lavatory. I shat out my lover in the loo!' And
also when I was in Edinburgh I started working voluntarily
in a very bad child-guidance clinic, but I listened to
children talking. So when I read Klein, it was not only that
it appealed to my imagination, but that the contact that I
had with a schizophrenic absolutely corresponded with what
she was talking about.
LR: Was it difficult to
work with Klein? What was it like to work with her?
HS: Well, analysis is
never easy, but I never found her persecuting. On the whole
it was a very good experience. And working with her, which I
did later, was not difficult at all. She didn't have any
side or pretentiousness. She was extremely open to new
ideas. She would only get fierce if one undermined her basic
concepts derived from her discoveries, then she got very
fierce. But she was very open to criticism and to ideas, and
she was very encouraging. I think she disagreed quite a lot
with the things that Bion started developing but she never
in any way blocked him or attacked him. She was a very good
person to work with.
LR: I wondered if I
could ask you about your own writing. Are your own creative
processes puzzling to you?
HS: I'm not an artist,
but like all artists I don't want to inquire too much into
the process. My first book took much too long, that was the
Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein. I feel a bit bad
about it because she very much wanted this book. It didn't
appear until after she died. But all the other books I wrote
were always under contract and that went much faster.
LR: One of the things
that we are looking at in this History Workshop Journal
special feature is dreams and creativity, an area on which
you have written a great deal.
HS: Here I would mention
the dreamer, the madman and the artist (I think it was a
lover in Shakespeare). One could paraphrase and say that the
madman, the dreamer and the artist have a lot in common. I
think that the unconscious expresses itself all the time, in
all sorts of ways. But it seems to me that there are more
direct ways because they are less involved in dealing with
reality. One is the dream; it happens in our mind. Even when
it is influenced by happenings outside, it is a purely
psychic production. There is a difference between a night
dream and a day dream. A daydream is very defensive. In
night dreams, there is a sort of psychic pressure to work
out a problem. In daydreams, the problem is denied and one
creates an ideal illusory world in which one lives. This is
actually linked with madness in a way. You know a dream is a
product of your mind. If you're in a daydream you tend to
see it as a reality. If you do, that way lies madness.
DP: In
your early work you were renowned for trying to work
psychoanalytically with severely-disturbed patients,
sometimes with schizophrenic patients. I'm wondering how you
would link that experience to the point you are making now
about forms of dreaming and states of madness.
HS:
Yes. What could in one person be represented by a dream, in
the psychotic becomes a reality - a hallucination; the
external world is as it were wiped out or distorted. The
psychotic's actual night dreams are felt to be like that
very often. So that psychotics sometimes get this strange
sense that the dream is the sanest part, in that they are
capable of certain psychic work and feeling but that that is
put in the dream and the dream is as it were put away while
reality gets invaded by nightmare.
But I brought in the daydream because Freud makes this
distinction between the daydreamer and the artist. He says
the artist comes back to reality because he acquires a love
of women and money and so on. I think the difference between
the daydreamer and the artist is very much bigger than that.
For one reason because the daydreamer denies problems and
the artist deals with the same problems that the dream would
deal with - deep unconscious anxieties; the artist differs
from the daydreamer because to my mind the former is rooted
in reality in two ways. We are aware that in his own area
the artist is extremely perceptive - you know, a painter who
looks at a landscape or a novelist, or a poet who describes
something. He is also very close to psychic reality and in a
way the more psychic reality there is in the work the more
and the deeper it hits us. The artist must also have an
extremely realistic perception of the tools of his trade and
of his materials. So it seems to me that the artist is one
who can, as it were, have a dream -let us say an unconscious
phantasy - and can give it symbolic expression. After all
the artist's work is making symbols. That's why it is so
directly in contact with the unconscious. He has no other
work. His work is to make symbols, in fact to make new
symbols, and that is what comes into the culture. We use the
symbols made by the artist who created them and he must have
an acute awareness of the reality of his materials. He knows
that the things he will make will not be really his dream
and he has to recognize the limits of the reality of his
material, of his technique, in order to actualize the dream.
I don't like action painting and things like that. I think
that the idea that you let your unconscious loose and splash
paint, like in free association, doesn't appeal to me
because it is the working through of the contradictions, of
the pain, that actually give the aesthetic experience to
which people respond.
One of the differences is also that dreams deal with our
internal problems to our satisfaction, but may be completely
meaningless to others. On the other hand, the artist does
want to communicate his dream, make a reality in the
external world which involves much more psychic work and
involves a lot of real, conscious work, which of course a
dreamer doesn't do. We can all dream and daydream - we can't
all be artists.
This
paper was published in the History Workshop Journal, Issue
No:49
Spring 1999.
In
allowing us to reproduce the paper we are indebted to the
Oxford University Press (OUP) and History Workshop
Journal. Please note that HWJ retain full copyright. The
journal's website can be found at www.hwj.oupjournals.org
Copyright
© 1999 History Workshop Journal.
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