Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Hanna Segal, Nicola Abel-Hirsch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415415736
• eBook ISBN: 9781134119103
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What is the role of psychoanalysis in today's world?

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow presents a selection of papers written by Hanna Segal. The collection introduces the reader to a wide spectrum of insights into psychoanalysis, ranging from current thoughts on the nature of dreaming to new ideas about vision and disillusionment. Her long interest in factors affecting war is pursued in her examination of the psychotic factors, symbolic significance and psychological impact of the events of September the 11th, and the ensuing war on Iraq.

The second half of the book discusses Segal's presentations to conferences and symposia from 1969-2000, this material is split into six sections:

• Models of the mind and mental processes
• Psychoanalytic technique
• Segal on Klein
• Segal on Bion
• Envy and narcissism
• Interviews.

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow is a masterly contribution to the field. Segal's clarity of thought and striking clinical illustrations make the book accessible to those new to the field as well as those acquainted with her seminal work.

PART ONE
Papers from 2000–2006

Introduction

The first paper in this book,‘Interpretation of dreams – 100 years on’ (2000) considers the nature of dreaming in psychotic and non-psychotic functioning. Segal notes the change in her own and her colleagues’ thinking. Now we pay closer attention to the level of symbolisation in the dream (symbol or symbolic equation), noting how the dream functions (representation or evacuation) and what function the dream fulfils in the transference. As Segal puts it, we are to analyse the dreamer not the dream.

In this paper Segal suggests that Freud’s later work on the life and death instincts has new implications for understanding dreams and she contends that the basic wish fulfilled by the dream is the wish of the ego to resolve conflict.

‘Disillusionment: the story of Adam and Eve and that of Lucifer’ (2000) was completed around the same time. It is not only clinical but also links with Segal’s interest in literature. She shows how a great poet like Milton, with his poetic intuition, can describe the basic psychological processes at work in Lucifer. Segal uses some of the same material from the ‘Interpretation of dreams – 100 years on’ paper to show how similar to Lucifer’s scenario are the tremendous struggles of psychotic patients to regain their sanity.

The psychotic disillusionment of Lucifer is contrasted with the non-psychotic disillusionment of Adam and Eve when they are expelled from paradise into ordinary reality and life. The relationship between the psychotic and the non-psychotic world is vividly explored in Lucifer’s return to the border of Heaven. At the beginning of his residence in Hell Lucifer is not completely cut off from non-psychotic reality. He has a memory of what he has lost and he wants to get out of Hell. He journeys across Chaos to God’s domain. When he arrives he sees both Heaven and the new world of man that has been created. Faced with loss of pride, envy of God and Jesus, pain at Adam and Eve’s sexual bliss and guilt about the damage he has done Lucifer returns to Hell and declares war.

In her analysis of psychotic group processes in the third paper, ‘September 11’ (2001) Segal describes a somewhat analogous situation occurring at the time of perestroika. This was a time of hope – a potential shift in attitudes – if all sides could turn their attention to domestic internal problems and give up their paranoid view of the other. Instead, triumphalism ruled the day in the West, and new enemies were found. As with Lucifer in Milton’s Paradise Lost there was a return to Hell and a declaration of war.

Some colleagues feel that Segal wrongly attempts to understand society by extrapolating from the individual-in-psychoanalysis to society-at-large. Segal argues, however, using Bion’s theories of group psychotic processes, that psychotic forces can powerfully distort the sane and constructive functioning of a group. The ‘September 11’ paper develops the analysis contained in Segal’s paper ‘Silence is the real crime’ (1987) and in her 1996 paper ‘From Hiroshima to the Gulf War and after: socio-political expressions of ambivalence’ (1996). She shows the psychotic factors in the background of September 11 and analyses the symbolic significance and psychological impact of September 11 and the ensuing war on Iraq.

The fourth paper, ‘Yesterday, today and tomorrow’ (2001) gives a clear view of the development of Kleinian thought in Britain and in particular of the development of Segal’s own thought. It is not in her eyes a weighty paper, but sets out clearly and succinctly what she deems to be the essential elements in psychoanalysis. It was in the presentation of this paper that Segal’s somewhat new link between the pleasure principle and the death instinct was brought to the attention of an audience and it was this idea in the paper that was particularly commented on in the discussion at the meeting and since.

In the fifth paper,‘Vision’ (2004) Segal returns to clinical concerns. Her view that voyeurism is a central factor in the psychotic process is a new area for enquiry. While preparing the ‘Vision’ paper for this book, Segal commented that she wished she had known what she knows now about voyeurism in some previous treatments of patients. The paper addresses the border between healthy curiosity and the voyeurism which distorts and perverts it. With psychotic patients she has observed that a breakdown is often preceded by an increase in voyeuristic activities and that being aware of this can enable it to be contained in the analysis. Segal suggests that the particular importance of vision may be related to the fact that, out of all the senses, vision directly presents the infant with the fact of mother’s separateness. It is this which is attacked, using the eyes as a channel for projective identification, to destroy the reality of the external world and the reality of their own impulses. This creates the hallucinatory world of madness, as when Lucifer saw Heaven across the border and turned away in rage to an omnipotent, omniscient and psychotic Hell.

In her sixth and most recent paper, ‘Reflections on truth, tradition and the psychoanalytic tradition of truth’ (2006), Segal addresses the basic problem of the status of analysis as a scientific procedure. The paper is purely theoretical – the only long paper of Segal’s which contains no clinical material. This is the culmination of a trend in her later work which addresses psychoanalytic, moral and political issues in a directly theoretical mode. It corresponds with a transfer of emphasis in her life from treating patients to supervising and writing.

In this paper Segal discusses the parameters established by Freud and shows how postulates from Freud’s theories and methods or procedures fit in with the criteria of the modern philosophy of mind and science. She seeks to validate the psychoanalytic claim that it is a new science and also considers what procedures could be seen as adverse to the development of this new science.

1
Interpretation of dreams – 100 years on

This paper was to be given at the Freud Museum in Vienna on the 100th anniversary of the publication of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Unfortunately Segal was unable to attend because of illness and the paper was presented by a colleague.⁴ This is the first publication in English.⁵

Psychoanalysts love dreams and most of our patients know it. Many years ago, a patient was very co-operative in his analysis. He brought a number of dreams with fruitful associations. As time went on I became a bit suspicious. It seemed too good to be true. One day he started a session saying, ‘I’ve got a fruity one for you today’. He dreamt that he was alone on a sledge somewhere in Siberia being pursued by wolves. He was alone and frightened but he had a supply of fresh meat and kept throwing chunks of it to the pursuing pack thus keeping them at bay. The meaning of the dream wasn’t hard to find – analysts can be warded off by juicy dreams. The rest of his analysis wasn’t all that easy.

Freud is often quoted as having described dreams as ‘the royal road to the unconscious’. This is a misquote – Freud actually said, ‘The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind’.⁶ In The Interpretation of Dreams⁷ he gives us the key to the understanding of a whole new world – the world of our dreams, our unconscious phantasies, which are the basic matrix of our personality. He introduced us to the world of dream thought and dream language. These are irreversible discoveries basic to our view of the world in the same way that whatever new discoveries we made about astronomy since Copernicus nobody can ever again think of the earth as being flat. It is a basic tenet of psychoanalysis that dreams have a psychic meaning and a psychic function. They arise out of psychic conflict and express themselves in the dream language, the language of mental representation. These are the unchangeable laws of dream functioning. To the end of his life Freud considered The Interpretation of Dreams his most important book. This is not surprising as the understanding of dream language was the key to the understanding of unconscious phantasy because it is in dreams, unimpeded by rational thought or current events, that unconscious phantasy expresses itself most richly and directly. According to Freud, the aim of the dream is the fulfilment of repressed unconscious wishes through mental representation.

But Freud’s later work brought new problems. For instance, what wish is fulfilled? After 1920⁸ it wasn’t possible any more to think of a simple libidinal wish fulfilment. Did the dream fulfil libidinal wishes or the wishes of the superego (and the superego, according to Freud, is infused with the death instinct)? I think that the basic wish which is fulfilled by the dream is the wish of the ego to resolve conflict. I would say that the dream work is a working through. Freud didn’t basically revise his theory of dreams in the light of his later concepts. I think he refers to the workings through in relation to dreams only once in his later work.

Nevertheless, his later work inevitably threw a new light on our understanding of dreams. For instance, a reformulation of his instincts theory:⁹ his new theory argued that the basic conflict is between life and death instincts. The increasing importance he gave to internal object relationships, his discovery of the transference, etc. all led to a new perspective on mental phenomena including, of course, dreaming.

Looking at his concept of dream work one is impressed by how great is the psychic work performed by the ego in creating a dream. Freud addressed himself to the question, ‘What happens if the dream fails to fulfil its function?’ One could re-word it,‘What happens if the ego is unable to perform the psychic work involved in the dream?’ A central part of dream work is to evolve a symbolic language. The failure of dream work reflects a failure in symbol formation. Klein initiated the study of symbol formation and described some of its psychopathology. She recognised the all important role of symbol formation for the development of the ego.¹⁰ She views symbol formations as the basis of sublimation. In the paper, ‘The importance of symbol formation in the development of the ego’, based on the analysis of an autistic boy, she addresses herself to the pathology of symbol formation and demonstrates how the inhibition in symbol formation leads to an arrest in the development of the personality. In that paper she deals with the inhibition of symbol for mation. In 1954,¹¹ I suggested that there can also be a malformation rather than inhibition of the process. I suggested that there is a difference between what I call symbolic equation deriving from the paranoid-schizoid position and proper symbols which can only be formed in the depressive position. In the paranoid-schizoid position, excessive projective identification results in concrete equations – a part of the ego is confused with the object and, as a result, the symbol that is a creation of the ego becomes equated with the object resulting in a concrete equation. In the depressive position the total possession and identification with the object is gradually given up and the mourning process related to the loss of the object results in the setting up in the internal world of an internal object which is not wholly identified with or confused with the actual external object. Thus the symbolic function is initiated. In Bion’s words the infant recognises that ‘no breast; therefore a thought’.¹² Bion further extended this work by analysing the elements of which concrete symbolisation is formed. I am sure you are all familiar with Bion’s concept of ‘container’ and ‘contained’.¹³ According to him, the infant projects into the mother inchoate elements which he calls beta and if those elements are taken in and appropriately responded to by the mother they get transformed into alpha elements which become elements of symbolism and are capable of further transformations. I see it as beta elements acquiring psychic meaning. Beta elements only lend themselves to projection but alpha elements are ‘such stuff as dreams are made of’. They are elements of dream thought and phantasy.

We know that dreams are related to repression. Jones¹⁴ said that ...

Table of contents

• Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
• THE NEW LIBRARY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
• ALSO IN THIS SERIES
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• General introduction
• PART ONE Papers from 2000–2006
• PART TWO Contributions to symposia, conferences and other occasional writings
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index