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Hanna Segal obituary

Hanna Segal applied her professional insights to subjects as wide-ranging as global politics and artistic creativity. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Hanna Segal, who has died aged 93, was among a handful of psychoanalysts whose international pre-eminence was unquestioned. She made fundamental contributions to psychoanalytic theory and practice and, over a career of more than 60 years, was the leading exponent of the ideas of Melanie Klein.

Segal developed the theory of symbolism, the understanding of the nature of creativity, and the establishment of a psychoanalytic approach to severe disturbance, including psychosis. She was also known for her exploration of the functioning of phantasy (unconscious fantasy) and for her detailed elaboration of the inner struggle between forces that strive towards living and development, and those that pull towards destruction.

Segal, Herbert Rosenfeld, Wilfred Bion and Betty Joseph constituted a small group of major thinkers whose influence has remained central to the development of psychoanalysis; but Segal was unique among this group since, in the tradition laid down by Sigmund Freud, her work encompassed a very broad span. She was able to demonstrate the relevance of psychoanalytic thinking to human knowledge in general, and this made her work well known outside the field of psychoanalysis.

She was born Hanna Poznanska, into a highly cultured family in Łódz´, Poland. Her father, Czeslaw, was a barrister, an art critic and a newspaper editor. In the early days, Hanna's mother, Isabella, lived the life of a typical bourgeois lady but, when life took a downward turn, her strength and resourcefulness became manifest. The family moved to Geneva, although Hanna returned to Warsaw to complete her education.

By her late teens she had already read all the Freud that had been translated into Polish. Other early intellectual influences included Voltaire, Rousseau, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Proust and Pascal. Having witnessed both poverty and lack of political freedom, she joined the Polish socialist party and her commitment to the left continued throughout her life. Psychoanalysis was, as she put it, "a godsend", as in it she found a way of combining her deepest intellectual interests with her desire to help people.

The rise of fascism saw the expulsion of her father from Switzerland, and the family, now stateless and impoverished, took up residence in Paris, where Hanna joined them in 1939. In 1940 they again took flight, this time for the UK, where Hanna completed her medical studies in London and Edinburgh. In Edinburgh, she met the psychoanalyst WRD Fairbairn, which determined the further course of her life. After completing her medical education she moved to London, where she played a major part in the rehabilitation of mentally ill Polish soldiers. She was accepted for training at the British Psychoanalytic Society and entered into analysis with Klein, completing her training in 1945, at the young age of 27. The analysis with Klein was central to her development. The year 1946-47 was an extraordinary one as during it she married the mathematician Paul Segal, conceived her first child and presented her first paper, A Psychoanalytic Contribution to Aesthetics, to the British Psychoanalytical Society.

Soon after she qualified, she trained as a child analyst, being supervised by Paula Heimann, Esther Bick and Klein, and began teaching students at the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Her first book, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (1964), in which Klein's ideas were illustrated through clinical material from Segal's own patients, became and remains a standard text. Her second book, Klein (1969), in the Fontana Modern Masters series, was also a homage to Freud and Klein. This series was meant for a popular audience and Segal put Klein's work in its context by reviewing Freud's contribution and showing how Klein built on this and extended it.

In 1952 she became a training analyst and built up an active private practice with a variety of patients, including candidates in training, psychotic patients and also some artists, who sought help because they were blocked in their work. This enabled her to make use of her interest in creativity, art and literature, and led to the publication of A Psychoanalytic Contribution to Aesthetics, her now famous paper, which remains perhaps the most original attempt at a psychoanalytical understanding of creativity.

In this paper Segal did not restrict herself to a study of the psychology of the artist. She showed how psychoanalysis can also contribute to the understanding of aesthetic questions. Segal puts the capacity to mourn at the centre of the artist's work and of the audience's aesthetic response. From this perspective, works of art derive their aesthetic depth from this inner struggle, the work itself giving it substance and constituting an act of reparation.

During this period Segal wrote her seminal paper on symbolism, Notes on Symbol Formation (International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1957), in which she distinguished between more primitive and developed forms of symbolic function, bringing a necessary clarification to the understanding of more disturbed states of mind. Many of the papers written in this highly productive period were reprinted in her third book, The Work of Hanna Segal (1981), while her fourth, Dream, Phantasy and Art (1991), explores afresh the interpretation of dreams and via this route proceeds to a deeper discussion of phantasy and symbolism.

Developments in psychoanalytic theory were combined with her interest in literature and politics in Psychoanalysis, Literature and War (1997). The paper The Clinical Usefulness of the Concept of the Death Instinct (1993, International Journal of Psychoanalysis), republished in this volume, outlines the way the balance between the life and death instincts determines the individual's attitude to reality, as exemplified by the two possible reactions to states of need. One, driven by the life instinct, is life-seeking and object-seeking, leading to an attempt to satisfy those needs in the real world, where necessary by aggressive striving. The other, under the influence of the death instinct, has as its aim to annihilate experience of need and the mental pain that goes with it. Here the self, or that part of the self capable of experiencing pain, is inhibited or destroyed and, instead of a reliance on reality, the patient turns to omnipotent phantasy as a solution and thus leads a highly restricted life.

In her sixth and final book, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (2010), Segal included a fascinating discussion of the Eden myth as presented by Milton in Paradise Lost. She argued that, for man, the expulsion from paradise is nothing more that a return to the reality of ordinary life. However, Milton's account captures a more disturbing human response to exclusion – Satan filled with envy dedicates himself to a spoiling of goodness and especially of creativity.

Segal believed that the psychoanalytic understanding of the pervasiveness of our destructiveness, and the human cost of its denial, can contribute in an important way to socio-political questions. Although she was criticised for her political involvement, some suggesting it went against the neutrality that characterises psychoanalysis, she believed this was based on a misunderstanding. Psychoanalytic neutrality, she asserted, is a clinical stance for the consulting room and needs to be distinguished from "allowing oneself to be neutered as a citizen". Here she was clearly in the tradition of Freud.

She was one of the prime movers behind the formation of a psychoanalytic movement against nuclear armaments. Her paper Silence is the Real Crime (International Review of Psychoanalysis, 1987) remains one of the most important psychoanalytic contributions to the nuclear debate. Following the end of the cold war, she expressed the fear that the west would be unable to manage without maintaining an enemy to fuel its paranoid system of thinking and she viewed the post 9/11 context and the Gulf wars from this perspective. In 2006 she wrote: "What does the future hold? It is pretty grim, because global oppression, which includes mass murder as well as total economic exploitation, leaves desperate terrorism as almost the only weapon for the oppressed ... This expanding global empire, like all such things, has to be sustained through control of the media – and this is of necessity based on a series of lies. From the humane (and psychoanalytic) point of view we are led as citizens to struggle with the unending task of exposing lies for the preservation of sane humane values – this is our only hope."

Segal served as president of the British Psychoanalytic Society from 1977 until 1980 and as vice-president of the International Psychoanalytical Association on two occasions. She was a visiting professor at University College London in 1987-88. In 1992, she received the Mary S Sigourney award for contributions to psychoanalysis.

Throughout her life Segal had a deep passion for literature, including detective stories, and she wrote papers on novels by Joseph Conrad, Patrick White and William Golding. She was proud of her family, and followed their considerable successes and shared their worries. Her husband, Paul, died in 1996; Segal is survived by three sons, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Hanna Maria Segal, psychoanalyst, born 20 August 1918; died 5 July 2011

Jon Henley's interview with Hanna Segal at the time of her 90th birthday

Dr Hanna Segal: Psychoanalyst who was inspired by Melanie Klein and contributed hugely to the field of cultural studies

By Michael Feldman

Monday, 1 August 2011

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Segal communicated complex ideas accessibly: 'The freer we are to think...the richer are our experiences,' she wrote.

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Hanna Segal was an outstanding psychoanalyst, teacher and writer, and a remarkable human being.

In the course of her long working life she made important and lasting contributions to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, as well as the field of cultural studies. She was greatly influenced by the work of Melanie Klein, and became the foremost exponent of Klein's theoretical and clinical approach.

Hanna Segal was born in 1918 in Lodz, in Poland, to a well-to-do assimilated Jewish family. Her father was a successful lawyer who spoke many languages and had a deep interest in literature and art. Segal shared his intellectual gifts and his broad cultural and political interests. Her mother was a beautiful woman who supported the family during some of the difficult times they were to experience. Segal was deeply attached to an older sister, who died at the age of four from scarlet fever. She said that she felt her sister was the only person who had truly loved her, and the experience of this loss remained with her throughout her life. When she was 12 the family moved to Geneva, where her father became the editor of one of the publications of the League of Nations.

Segal thrived in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of pre-war Geneva, and in its international school. She developed a passion for literature and read extensively with an increasing depth of understanding, absorbing the work of many of the most important French and German philosophers. Here she first read Proust and discovered the work of Sigmund Freud. Her reading, particularly of Freud, led to the realisation "that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, more fascinating than human nature. And human relations".

Segal remained attached to her Polish roots, and at the age of 16persuaded her parents to allow her to return to Warsaw to complete her education. The difficult political situation in Poland led to her involvement in Socialist groups, and while on a visit to Geneva in 1936 she tried to sneak out of the house to join the Republican fighters in Spain, but was stopped by her parents. When her father was expelled from Switzerland on political grounds she joined her parents in Paris in 1939. There, she met her future husband Paul Segal, a student of mathematics who she had known as a child in Poland, and she briefly continued the medical studies she had begun in Warsaw.

At the time of the German occupation of Poland, Segal, like many young Polish émigrés, felt a passionate desire to return to Warsaw. She fought to get on the last train back to Warsaw but was turned away. She remarked ruefully that none of the friends who had gone back survived: had she returned, she too would have been killed. As the Germans marched on Paris in spring 1940, the family fled across France and found places on the last Polish boat heading for England.

Segal completed her medical studies in Edinburgh, where the university had created a faculty for Polish medical students. She met Ronald Fairbairn, who introduced her to the work of Melanie Klein. She was immediately gripped by the depth and insight of Klein's writing, which spoke to her own interests and experiences. Fairbairn had encouraged her to train as a psychoanalyst and she moved to London, where she worked at the Paddington Children's Hospital, and later in rehabilitating Polish soldiers, many of whom were suffering from mental illness.

Segal persuaded Klein to accept her as a patient, and she joined the psychoanalytic training programme, qualifying at 27, the youngest member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She emerged as a gifted clinician and teacher, and a highly sought-after training analyst and supervisor. She inspired generations of students and analytical colleagues in Britain and throughout the world. In her writings she made major contributions to child analysis, the theory of symbolism, and the psychoanalytic understanding and treatment of severe borderline and psychotic patients. Like Conrad, a Polish writer Segal admired, she showed a remarkable command of English, and a capacity to communicate complex ideas clearly and accessibly.

Segal was part of an inspired group of psychoanalysts which included Herbert Rosenfeld, and Wilfred Bion, who were absorbing and developing the work of Freud, Abraham and Ferenczi, and the next generation which included Klein, Riviere, Isaacs and Heimann. Their pioneering work with more seriously disturbed patients was built upon Klein's understanding of primitive mental mechanisms.

Segal showed how Klein's work offered a new and deeper understanding of the way the child's internal world of phantasies gradually evolved out of the child's experience of his or her important early figures. These unconscious phantasies continually influence, in turn, the child's perceptions of, and interaction with, the external world. This model of the internal world and its dynamic relationship with external relationships allowed for the development of a greater understanding of the psychology of infancy and childhood. Our knowledge of these mechanisms, which remain active in adult life, is valuable in understanding some of the disturbance and suffering encountered in adult patients.

Segal explored how, from the beginning of life, the individual develops mechanisms for coping with pain and anxiety, whether arising from the experience of need, or loss. Some involve attempting to satisfy needs, and having to face the inevitable pain, frustration, anger and guilt which are part of human experience. Other responses involve attempting to obliterate thinking and the experience of pain, turning instead to omnipotent phantasy to evade reality. In her paper Psychoanalysis and Freedom of Thought (1981), Segal wrote, "Freedom of thought... means the freedom to know our own thoughts... the unwelcome as well as the welcome, the anxious thoughts, those felt as 'bad', or 'mad' as well as constructive thoughts and those felt as 'good' or 'sane'. Freedom of thought is being able to examine their validity in terms of external or internal realities. The freer we are to think, the better we can judge these realities, and the richer are our experiences".

Segal's intellectual, cultural and political interests were broad, and she used her psychoanalytic knowledge to write important papers on literature, aesthetics and socio-political studies. She was passionately opposed to nuclear arms, and her paper "Silence is the Real Crime" (1987) was an important and original contribution to the debate.

Segal rose to great eminence. She was President of the British Psycho-Analytical Society and Vice-President of the International Psychoanalytical Association. She held the Freud Memorial Chair at University College, London and was awarded the Sigourney Prize for contributions to psychoanalysis. Her passion for life included a deep interest in art, artists and writers. She enjoyed good food, company and wine. She enjoyed travelling, with a gift for vivid description of her adventures and the people she had encountered.

Her family were immensely important to her; she took great pride in the achievements of her three talented sons, and the arrival of daughters-in-law, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Her husband Paul had supported her professional life by taking on many of the household tasks. He developed Parkinson's disease, and 18 years ago Hanna and Paul moved to live with their son Michael and his wife, who provided them with devoted care, which was particularly important after Paul's death in 1996.

Hanna Segal believed passionately in the freedom of thought as a fundamental human value, and she exemplified this ideal both in her work and in her life. For this she was respected, valued and loved by those who had the privilege of knowing her, working with her, or being helped by her.

Hanna Maria Poznanska, psychoanalyst: born Lodz, Poland 20 August 1918; married 1946 Paul Segal.

Hanna Segal - Obituary

Dr Hanna Segal - Hanka as she was affectionately known to her family, friends and colleagues - was one of the world’s most distinguished psychoanalysts. Her death at her family home, aged 93 years ended a remarkable life during which she produced an enduring body of work.

In addition to research devoted to the specifics of psychoanalysis, she contributed to the understanding of art, literature and creativity. Through her political writings she drew attention to the dangerous lure in a nuclear age of mankind's deep-seated urges towards self-destruction. In a psychoanalytic career spanning more than sixty years she embodied the values of freedom of thought and enquiry. She had a keen response to enemies of imagination, culture or truth

She had great presence and was renowned for marshalling her characteristically lucid lines of thought in fluent, if highly accented, English. She lacked that inhibiting self-consciousness which is distinctively English. Instead she was individual and non-conformist, but in such a natural way that the conformity to which she didn’t conform seemed trivial. She wore tailored and trousered suits in times when this was definitely not the done thing for women. She wore her hair short. Throughout her life she was cheerfully addicted to nicotine and was catholic about the means of its delivery, using pipes, cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco, gums and inhalers. Of all these, she once confided, she preferred the pipe, before going on to wonder why some people felt that pipes were unfeminine, a view which she didn’t share. Yet she managed to be feminine and womanly in a deep way. As well as the powerful intellect, perceptiveness and sagacity there was something else in her that, full of humanity, was innocent and touching.

She was born Hanna Poznanska, the younger daughter of assimilated Jews, Czeslaw and Isabelle, on the 20th August, 1918 in Lodz, Poland. Hanna was permanently marked by the death of her four-year-old sister, Wanda, from scarlet fever when Hanna was two years old. She recollected her parents as being kindly, but without much understanding of what their only surviving child felt, “I was always left in that flat unending Polish landscape, you know that long valley which starts in the Ukraine and runs down to Germany. There was nothing.”. But her father, a lawyer, journalist and writer, began to pay her attention encouraging her intellectual curiosity and what was to become her lifelong habit of wide reading.

This period came to an abrupt end in 1931 when her father, a gambler, attempted suicide having spent his clients’ money to meet his debts. The Poznanskis fled to Geneva, where her mother showed great resourcefulness. Her father took up journalistic work with the League of Nations. The Nazi threat, which was to destroy so many Central European lives, was growing. In the Poznanskis’ case, it led her family to move to Paris while Hanna spent most of her teenage years in Warsaw, where she formed her lifelong left-wing sympathies. There she met Paul Segal, then a young mathematician and in 1946 they were to marry. They went on to have three sons. But it was only chance that the couple were in Paris, not Warsaw when it was occupied. At the end of September, 1939, as the Wehrmacht began its advance upon Paris, she and her parents escaped, on the last Polish ship to leave France.

Over this decade she read Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Proust. Her father had introduced her to Freud’s ideas about what lies beneath the supposedly reasonable surface of our everyday lives. Hanna readily grasped Freud’s view that our thoughts are full of sensualities, desires, susceptibilities, ambitions and rivalries, and recognised the way that these connect with the feelings which young children experience towards their immediate family – mother, father, brothers and sisters and playmates.

Hanna completed her training as a doctor in 1943, in the Polish section of Edinburgh’s Medical School. There she followed up her interest in psychoanalysis by visiting the Scottish psychoanalyst W.R.D. Fairbairn, who gave her two books: Melanie Klein’s Psychoanalysis of Children and Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanism of Defence. It was Klein’s book that had the impact. Later, she would say that Freud discovered the child in the adult, while Klein discovered the infant. At the time, even Klein’s view that babies formed relationships or had a mental life was controversial. But the young Hanna Poznanska had found the ideas upon which to base her life’s work. Inspired, she returned to London to seek analysis with Klein. By the age of 27, she had finished her training, and five years later, became the Institute’s youngest-ever training analyst. She went on to analyse and supervise students and colleagues from all over the world, who themselves were to make important contributions to psychoanalysis. She became President of the British Psycho-Analytical Society and Vice-President of the International Psychoanalytical Association. She held the Freud Memorial Chair at University College London and was a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Segal’s scientific contributions arose out of her use of Klein’s ideas about the function of children’s play, namely the way that issues which matter most to the child are expressed and can be worked through symbolically. They concern the basics: feeding and being fed: what goes in and what comes out of the body; the imagined relations between mother and father; preoccupations with the possibility of babies inside the mother's tummy - all of these imaginings imbued with both love and hate. This phantasy world transmutes into a normal adulthood, but something of its original nature survives into adulthood to be an active though hidden source of our motivations. Dreams and our imaginations provide a window through which it is possible to infer the character of this infantile world. Klein had suggested that mental disorders, including such serious illnesses as schizophrenia, began in miscarriages of these processes of mental development in earliest infancy and childhood.

In 1943, when Segal had first read Klein, it had reminded her of her meeting with a young woman who was in the midst of a schizophrenic breakdown repeating, ‘I lost my lover in the loo, I lost my lover in the loo’. Klein’s ideas about the phantasies which lie behind children’s play threw light on the form taken by the unfortunate woman’s expression of her painful but delusional state of loss. On the basis of these insights into this continuity between infancy and adulthood, Segal was able to begin the first unmodified psychoanalytic treatments of seriously mentally ill patients. She came to understood how, unlike normal children in their play, analysands with these conditions were unable to function symbolically. If she tried to talk to an analysand about his feeling in bits, he might hear this as her attempting to make him fall apart. She went deeply into this problem where speech and words are taken for actions or things. When the analyst understands the way this works, the analysand can regain a capacity to think about emotionally important issues.

In favourable cases, this intensive work helps the patient in many ways. Hanna Segal was unusually talented as a psychoanalytic clinician. But this kind of work makes great demands and only a few patients with psychosis have been treated in this way. In terms of research, Segal’s findings deepened the psychoanalytic understanding of all forms of mental disorder, and of how the mind of a person is formed. This has benefited many patients receiving less intensive psychotherapeutic treatments in the NHS.

She went on to extend her enquiries into the human urge to symbolise. Her understanding of how the capacity to symbolise develops allowed her to study inhibitions in the creativity of artists and writers. Briefly, she discovered that the psychological processes of mourning and grief play a key part. The artist’s internal world contains regions that are experienced as damaged or destroyed and unconsciously, the artist feels that his (or her) destructive impulses have been responsible. Artists try to repair these areas by making works which symbolise what has been damaged in phantasy. Some also show a passion for destruction because this returns them to a ground zero, and they can begin the work of re-creation and repair anew. But in addition, Segal always emphasised the basic importance of the artist’s technical skills and their dedication to their craft.

Her ongoing clinical experiences continued to tutor her in the way that the will to live and feelings of love are closely intertwined with wishes to destroy and feelings of hate. In one of her papers, she quoted from Jack London's Martin Eden. The eponymous hero commits suicide, ‘It was the automatic instinct to live. He ceased swimming, but the moment he felt water rising above his mouth his hands struck out sharply with a lifting movement. "This is the will to live", he thought, and the thought was accompanied by a sneer.’ In this contemptuous sneer, Segal saw that man’s drive towards self-annihilation is intended to free him from a sense of imprisonment by the limitations and pains that life can impose. But she always remained impressed by the resilience of man's drive towards life and creativity, although not at the expense of realism. For instance, she felt that silence or complacency in the face of the possibility of nuclear conflict was itself a dangerous expression of our self-destructive tendencies.

Her husband Paul died in 1996. In her last years, she became frail, and was looked after by her family which spanned four generations. She stopped seeing patients when she judged she was no longer up to it, but until the final last weeks of her life she continued to enjoy meeting the apparently inextinguishable requests for her supervisions from psychoanalysts who travelled to see her from all over the world. She is survived by her three sons, two daughters-in-law, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Her books include: Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein, 1964, Klein (Fontana Modern Masters series, 1969), The Work of Hanna Segal, 1981, Dream, Phantasy, and Art, 1991, Psychoanalysis, Literature and War, 1997 & Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 2010.

Considered more widely than its effect upon the world of psychoanalysis, her death marks another part of the close of the 19th & 20th Century epoch, in which new modes of Western thought liberated us from old beliefs. We have now entered the era of neuroscience and may expect important discoveries about how the brain works, but we will do well not to lose sight of Hanna Segal’s insights into mental disorder, her understanding of some of the uncomfortable facts about our natures, and contending with these of the remarkable power of our drive towards freedom and truth.

Other obituaries appeared in the NY Times, (Paul Vitello) http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/health/02segal.html

and The Scotsman, (Robert Malcolm)
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/obituaries/Obituary-Dr-Hanna-Segal-psychoanalyst.6806971.jp

Words spoken about Hanna Segal at her funeral
 

Agnes Segal

It is my very great privilege to welcome you, on behalf of the Segal family, to this ceremony in honour of Hanna Segal.  In case anyone does not know me, I am Agnes Segal, wife of Mike, Hanna’s second son. 
 
Whether we knew her as Dr Segal, Hanna, Hanka, Mum, Granny or Gran each of us has precious memories of her life.  She had a commanding presence.  Even Dr Gerrard, her GP, a person who saw her at her most weak and frail moments, commented to us on her death-bed that she was a formidable woman.  She had a powerful intellect and wide-ranging academic and political interests about which we will hear more later, but it has to be said also that that wonderful brain of hers didn’t contain an ounce of practical, common sense.  That sometimes made living with her a challenge; but I have been struck this last week by just how quickly my memories of those challenges has faded and I know that my abiding memory of her will be the love she had for her family and for those they loved.  She welcomed her daughters-in-law and grand-daughters-in-law, not without criticism it is true, but unconditionally and with open arms. She was never happier than when she had the entire family, with its many generations, around her.
 
I now have the great pleasure of introducing a number of different speakers each of whom knew Hanna in a different capacity, who will tell us about the many different ways in which she has influenced their lives.
 
Our first speaker today is Betty Joseph, her closest friend and psychoanalytic colleague and the person who has known her longest here in England.
 
Betty Joseph

It is  a very sad occasion to be talking about the death of not only   a very valuable and valued  analyst but a very  loved friend of more than 60 years.     Hanna was one of the very  first analysts I met when I came to London in  the forties .   In many ways it seems like the end of an era .but this not  quite right, Hanna  really bridged  eras.   She belonged to the period of such outstanding figures as Klein,  Rosenfeld, Bion, Joan Riviere etc. but she belongs also to the current generation, she was the analyst of a large number of current analysts and had supervised many others.  Although true that  it is a very sad occasion – her death at this time is exactly what she would have chosen.  She had so much illness and  pain , and her life had become increasingly restricted . Two days before her death she enjoyed a trip to Regents Park with a friend, one day before she very much enjoyed seeing her youngest grandchild Josh , and the following day  died peacefully. She could not have managed the last years of her life had it not been for  the absolutely devoted and loving care of Agnes and Michael with whom she had been living for the last years. This was of course not an easy arrangement as they each could acknowledge but the deep mutual affection made it work very well.
 
Hanna’s enjoyment of life and all it offered was manifest,  but the word I particularly associate with her was ‘passion’ one could see what she meant by this in relation to her family, to psychoanalysis and sociological events.   After the end of her analysis she became a close colleague and friend of Melanie.Klein and was an active  founder member of the Melanie Klein Trust , at a very young age she became a training analyst and made a significant impression on her supervisees.   One analyst who years ago was supervised by her recently said  to me about Hanna ‘she was fierce but always fair’, to the student and the patient.  This type of fierce but always fair was also clear in her attitude to people, if she felt there was something untrustworthy in a person’s character, personality, she could appear to be too highly critical, but in the end she turned out to be right.  This straightness and honesty was fundamental to her and to her work.   But she was also very generous and appreciative of what others had to give .   When I first knew her Hanna was already qualified, and when I started writing papers she would read mine and tell me what it was really about, its focus, and was immensely helpful.  Later  we each influenced the other in our ideas.   But it is not only her ideas theoretical and technical that have been so important in psychoanalysis, but something about her whole approach.   About twenty  years ago she was invited to speak at a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Associaton.   This was very unusual, at that period Klein’s work tended to be disregarded misunderstood, even ridiculed.  Hanna and a well known American analyst Dr Ed Weinshal each  gave detailed material of a clinical case and then each discussed the other’s.    Hanna was so well able to show herself, the analyst, at work and enter into and understand Dr Weinshal’s way of working  and he to make contact with her, that this meeting became legendary.   It is still frequently referred to.  It helped to start to break down the immense barriers between British, particularly  Kleinian work and that of the Americans.
 
Hanna was also passionately concerned with current social problems .  In the early days of the CND, campaign for nuclear disarmament, she organised and helped to build up a group of analysts against nuclear arms, and was untiring in her work for this.   She was deeply interested in literature;   she was very well read and wrote important and fascinating papers on  a number of writers who particularly interested her, such as Conrad and Golding . One of her other life long interests  was  art and aesthetics and  here too she wrote some fundamental papers. She was therefore always stimulating and full of ideas to be with.   From quite early in her career her value was recognised, for example she started to be invited to go abroad to lecture or give seminars, she was President of the British Psychoanalytic  Society in the 70s,  she was awarded a Sigourney award, but these matters  were never stressed nor seemed to interfere with very normal family living.
Hanna was always interesting and fun to be with.   Even when she became old and very dependant on others she never became burdensome  probably because of her sense of fun and her warmth  and her interest in life.   She lives in my mind and memory not only as an outstanding psychoanalyst  and deeply loved  friend but a very real and rich human being.

 
Agnes Segal
 
Our next speaker is Paul, her second grandson, the younger son of Dan and Julia.

 
Paul Segal
 
Granny was a brilliant and insightful woman, with a deep understanding of other people. She loved art and literature, particularly as expressions of the human condition. She was also very high maintenance. It may be a sign of my affection for her that I’ve met one other woman of whom all of that is true, and I married her.
 
I learned how high maintenance granny was from the trips we took together, when I would accompany her to a conference, or just on holiday. The first time I think I was 18, and she had a conference in Greece. She must have been a mere 76. I remember on the way back at the airport in Greece, her looking studiously at the sign saying “departures,” and then determinedly setting off in the opposite direction.
 
The last time we took each other on holiday was when Ingrid and I went with her to Cyprus. I’m incredibly glad that Ingrid got to know her, and that they got on so well. Ingrid already knew about her work because, like most people in Buenos Aires, half her friends and family seem to be psychoanalysts. In Cyprus Ingrid learned about granny’s other field of expertise: imbibing nicotine. I’ve never known anyone who had mastered so many mechanisms for getting the stuff into her body. In Cyprus she had with her cigarettes, cigarillos, nicotine gum, and chewing tobacco. When Ingrid was giving up smoking and was using nicotine inhalers, granny managed to get one off her to add to her arsenal.
 
Granny was extremely insightful about many things, but on day-to-day matters she could get an idea in her head that seemed to come from nowhere. One day on the trip in Cyprus we had been driving around some villages and had met a friendly old Cypriot who had lived in Willesden Green for some years before returning to his village. For the rest of the trip, Granny decided to refer to him as “the Welshman”. Each time I would point out that he was not so much Welsh as Cypriot, and each time granny would say “ah yes”, and then a little later would again refer to him as “the Welshman”. I really was curious so eventually I asked her: “he’s not Welsh, and I keep reminding you he’s not Welsh, so why is it, do you think, that you keep calling him ‘the Welshman’?” She looked at me innocently and said, “I don’t know!”
 
I am very sad that she is gone. But after an incredibly full, productive, and long life, she was certainly ready to die. She had been pretty relaxed about the prospect for several years, as I discovered when she made us sign Do Not Resuscitate orders before we went to Cyprus. In fact I nearly sent her to an earlier and more watery grave on that holiday, when the boat we were using became unanchored and drifted off while we were snorkelling in the middle of the Mediterranean. Evidently we all survived, but though I had been quite unnerved at the thought of her sinking beneath the waves, she was extremely calm about the whole episode. I suppose that, given how much granny loved the Mediterranean, ending her days in it might not have seemed so objectionable to her.
 
I remember recently she was complaining about the state of the world and how much worse everything was getting. I started to argue that, though there was plenty to complain about, in many respects things were less bad than they used to be—lower child mortality around the world, fewer dictatorships, and so on. She thought about it and then said, “maybe you are right. That’s the problem with getting old. Maybe I think the world’s going to the dogs because I’m going to the dogs.”
 
She was a woman of many sayings. One of my favourites was “everything in moderation, including moderation”. But the one that I think affects me most was her reaction to the book The Road. I know many people who loved the book, but granny and Ingrid are the only people I know who didn’t find it depressing at the same time as moving. The book is about a man travelling with his son in a post-apocalyptic world, trying to find life, and trying to keep some hope alive, for the sake of his son. For granny the take-home message was that however dark the circumstances, it is essential “to keep a little fire burning”.
 
In that conversation she said how important it was for psychoanalysts to keep a little fire burning in the face of what she called the “anti-mind” approach of pharmaceutical companies that try to reduce human emotions to chemical responses. But I think she was keeping a little fire of hope burning against many things throughout her life, from world events like the war and the cold war, but also the personal tragedies of the death of her sister when she was a child, and much later when grandpa got ill. Through all of that she refused to portray herself as a victim. I’m not saying that she suffered in silence when it came to her many aches and pains—that wouldn’t be true. But throughout her life she dedicated her efforts to understanding and addressing the problems of others, obviously as a psychoanalyst with her patients, but also politically, in her writings against war and nuclear weapons. In a world that was glorifying annihilation, that was her keeping the little fire burning.
 
My work on economic development concerns the unnecessary poverty around the world that is sustained by a dominant ideology of selfishness, and a collective lack of empathy. In my small efforts to promote a more humane approach I am trying to keep the little fire burning, and as I tend to it, I feel that granny is there with me.

 
Agnes Segal

Now we will hear from Julia, Hanna’s first daughter-in-law.

 
Julia Segal
 
I met Hanna in 1968, when I was 18 and Dan took me to his home from University.  I was deeply impressed.  Real art on the walls, a father with the driest sense of humour, and a mother who welcomed me warmly and enquired of her son discreetly, whether I needed a separate bed or not.  I had never met anyone like them.  Dan had already given me one of her papers to read - about Golding's The Spire, and my reaction on first meeting her was 'how come you write so beautifully and speak so badly?'  I then discovered she spoke English, French and Polish, all equally fluently and all with appalling accents.  She didn't mock my English French, nor my lack of a proper European education; but she did make me want to learn.  I learnt from the warmth and attention she gave her 8 year old son; I had never met a Jewish mother before.  Later, when she used to look after our son Joel, she always wanted to tell me what he had eaten, which I, being very un-Jewish, found very amusing.  She gave me books to read, mostly, to begin with, about the Holocaust, to bring me up to speed on what I needed to know about where the family came from. All my life I have relied on her for a supply of novels.  She took me through the works of Freud and Klein, explaining, expanding, illuminating.  She left me with countless words of wisdom;  about idealisation being a defence against persecuting phantasies, not reality;  about trusting people to bear truth, and the way covering things up leaves people alone with their fears;  and about interpreting, 'I only do it when I'm paid' (in other words, never socially) - not quite true, but an excellent statement of intent – (I hope you’re listening.)  .  She told me I should publish my lectures, then read what I wrote and told me very nicely that she knew I could write better, (so I did, and the books still sell).  Very early on she amazed me by encouraging me to make sure I had my own career and did not subordinate myself to her son and his.
 
When I pushed her, she talked to me about her own past, her own upbringing, much of which has been published.  She talked of her schooling in Geneva, when she discovered how different points of view make a difference;  she met a Lithuanian girl and enthusiastically greeted her as a fellow Pole, only to be shocked when the girl accused her of being part of an imperialist power which crushed Lithuania - like the Irish and the British, she explained to me.  She had worked with a Polish doctor during the war, helping to rescue Polish mental patients from appalling conditions in British Mental Institutions and take care of them in the countryside, in Epsom, amongst Poles. One of the groundsmen, I think it was, taught her to drive and she would drive across London late at night, to get back to nurse her mother who was dying of cancer and refusing the care of anyone except her daughter.  I think Hanna always preferred to be the doctor rather than the nurse, but as with her husband later, she did the caring she was required to do, although the cost was high.  She fell asleep at the wheel more than once: we are all fortunate that, she said, she simply rolled to a stop by the edge of the road. 
 
Hanna was a brilliant mother-in-law, and I am very grateful to her for many things. Her integrity and her work ethic have both been inherited by her sons.  Many of the family, including myself, have benefited enormously from the analyses she arranged for us with colleagues or friends.  (Being married to one of them, I am particularly grateful that she heeded Melanie Klein's advice and did not attempt to analyse her own sons.)  My own life has been hugely influenced by hers: my mother told me to look at a man's mother before I married him: I did, and she did not let me down.
 
Dan asked me to say this and this last bit comes from both of us.
 
Paul’s death 15 years ago, though a relief from a heavy burden of care for Hanna, left her lonely. We don't know how she would have managed had it not been for Agnes and Mike, who have for all these years been providing a home and the loving attention she needed. We both want to pay tribute to their patience and dedication - she was not an easy person to look after. So, thank you, Mike and Agnes. We also want to pay tribute to Pien Maltz, on whom Hanna relied for her beloved ultra-hot seaside holidays, to the ever-faithful Ann Gamble on whom she relied for company, care and lunch every morning, to Mary Block who took care of everything, and to Lilly Adams who cared for her during the last year. Many others of you took her walking or swimming and helped to keep her life varied and interesting: a tall order in anyone's ninth decade and beyond - thank you all.

 
Agnes Segal
 
Next may I introduce Amber, Dan and Julia’s daughter, Hanna’s youngest grandchild and the first girl to be born into the Segal family for 100 years.

 
Amber Segal
 
"Granny was notoriously hard to please, at least within the family, and at odds even with me on holiday aged 7 & 81 (when we both wanted my parents attention), so I was very touched that she was one of the few people who never discouraged me from studying English and seemed to look at it as a very respectable choice of education. I always felt like she was proud of me, not at all disappointed (though she never met my boyfriend) and I’ve been exceptionally proud of having such a renowned, intelligent and witty woman as my grandmother. I hope I’ve inherited at least part of what made her so brilliant (as the only girl grandchild I might have got more than my fair share) and I’ve been lucky to have her for my entire childhood. Now I’m technically an adult I hope whatever I go on to do, up until I’m 92 myself, she’d approve.

A poem by Percy Shelley (because I like poems):

MUSIC, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap'd for the belovèd's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

 
Agnes Segal
 
Our final speaker is John Steiner, originally one of Hanna’s analysands and later a valued colleague and kind friend.

 
John Steiner
 
 
At Melanie Klein's funeral, now 61 years ago, Hanna Segal spoke about Klein's understanding of death simply as the end of life. Hanna Segal had the same straight forward attitude to the finality of death.  Perhaps it is her straightforwardness and dislike of avoidant prevarications which made her so many friends and admirers but which could also provoke hurt and indignation.
 
Being in analysis with her meant confronting this same directness.  I had many criticism of her work which I am ashamed to admit filled many futile sessions.  Some were of course correct, and I vehemently argued to little effect, that smoking was harmful and that seeing patients end to end without a gap was not necessary.  However I particularly remember complaining that she always seemed so certain of herself and never expressed any doubts about her ideas or about Klein or about psychoanalysis.  Her retort was that if she had doubts she was certainly not going to discuss them with me!   You may not call this an interpretation but it was one of her more potent interventions that made me recognise the role I had been assuming.
 
She did not strive for perfection but she did always try to be true and this quality suffused all of her work and indeed her life.  That she made fundamental contribution to psychoanalysis will be demonstrated in later meetings, but that she enriched our lives and set us an example of how to live life to the full can be stated today.
 
Most of you will know that Hanna Segal qualified as a psychoanalyst in 1945 at the age of 27 and went on to train as a child analyst at a time of immense creativity and controversy in the British Psychoanalytical Society. She became the leading exponent and proponent of Klein's views but this did not prevent her from developing her own ideas in a highly original way. She made fundamental contributions to many areas of psychoanalysis including the understanding of symbolism, the treatment of psychotic patients, and psychoanalytic technique. For her the setting was central for technique because it reflected the attitude of the analyst to his work and to his patient and she was impatient with those who tampered with the setting and offered reassurance rather than understanding.
 
As you know her work covered a wide area and her writing on literature especially her papers on Conrad's The Secret Sharer, on Patrick White's The Vivisectionist and on William Golding's Spire explored the creativity of the author in relation to his capacity to tolerate reality and depression.
 
She never lost sight of the importance of truthfulness and she argued that although it is of course fundamental to all scientific endeavours that it is of special significance for psychoanalysis since the capacity for truthfulness is central to its therapeutic function.  But she was also compassionate especially to her patients and she knew that truth stripped of compassion is cruel.
 
I was especially impressed by her support for the role of the death instinct which many analysts want to do away with. She viewed the death instinct clinically rather than theoretically, and saw it as an expression of a hatred of reality.   She clarified this through a discussion of the two possible reactions to states of need.  One is life seeking and object seeking leading to an attempt to satisfy those needs in the real world, even when necessary by aggressive striving.  The other has as its aim to annihilate experience of need and the mental pain that goes with it. Instead of a reliance on reality the patient then turns to omnipotent phantasy as a solution.
 
Hanna Segal recognised that pain comes from living.  Death may then provide relief from pain, and although latterly she sometimes longed for such relief, she is universally recognised as a fighter for life.   She wrote important essays on the dangers of war and nuclear war in particular.  But she was also a political activist and organised meetings, helped to found the psychoanalytic movement against nuclear arms, and would join in the marches carrying her placard. She argued that analysts must be analytically neutral but that does not mean that we should allow ourselves to be politically neutered.  She was willing to speak out and in one of her recent essays quoting Nadezhda Mandelstam she affirmed that "Silence is the real crime against humanity".
 
I am going to finish by reading the last verse of the well known short poem from Shakespeare's Cymbeline, Fear No More The Heat O' The Sun.
 

 
 No exorciser harm thee!
 Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
 Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
 Nothing ill come near thee!
 Quiet consummation have;
 And renownéd be thy grave!

 
William Shakespeare
from Cymbeline, Act IV, Scene 2.
lines spoken by Guiderius and Arviragus

 
Closing
Agnes Segal
 
We are now going to listen to Mozart’s string quartet in C Major, Hanna’s favourite piece of music, - the piece she said she would choose to take if she were only allowed to take one disc to her Desert Island.  This interlude will give us an opportunity to dwell on our own special memories of her and thank her for the ways in which she has enriched our lives and deepened our insight.  After a few moments her coffin will slide quietly away taking her to rest in peace. 
 
Once it has gone please feel free to leave in your own time.