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Hanna Segal opens the door at the second ring. She turned 90 two days previously and is small, creased and walnut-brown, with a crop of startling white hair and a pair of eyes that look suitably gimlet-like but are, she observes dispassionately, not much use to anyone these days.
"Like the rest of me, really," she adds.
"I haven't been analysed myself for a couple of years now, but I would love some help in coping with a body that's started to behave as if it were a psychotic infant. It's like some narcissistic baby. Nothing is good enough for it. Nothing is ever quite right."
Segal is one of the most eminent psychoanalysts ever to have practised in Britain. Splendidly, despite living in this country for nearly 70 years, she speaks English with a great, gutteral mittel-European accent. Even better, while she has been forced to abandon her beloved pipe, every few minutes she takes a small wad of tobacco from a tin at her elbow, pops it surreptitiously into her mouth, and chews. Who does that, these days? It is impossible not to warm to her.
Hers is rather a strange profession, though. All that poking around in the dark, walled-off corners of people's minds, hunting down explanations for bizarre adult behaviour in obscure childhood events that invariably involve breasts or toilets. A lot of people have no time for it.
Segal, obviously, does. "The more I think about it," she says, "the importance lies in seeking truth. Not 'The Truth' with a capital T, an omniscience, but truth that is the same as reality. All we are really looking for, in a patient on the couch, is a distinction between lies and truth."
She no longer has a couch in her study, although the room, on the ground floor of large house in north London, is suitably sombre and book-lined. She stopped seeing individual patients a couple of years ago, although she still supervises major cases, from all over the world, by telephone.
But the kind of people who came to see her were, she says, generally those who "seek to avoid truth, and so end up in delusion. What you are aiming to achieve is a change in the direction of the mind, a bend towards truth. And while all science aims at truth, psychoanalysis is unique in recognising that the search for truth is, in itself, therapeutic."
The latter phrase is one penned by Segal and colleagues for the obituary of Melanie Klein, of whose work Segal is pretty much universally recognised as the most prominent postwar interpreter. Kleinian psychoanalysis is one of the two main schools within the British Psychoanalytical Society, the other being Freudian (after Anna, Sigmund's daughter).
Jon Henley
The Guardian, Monday 8 September 2008
At 90, the psychoanalyst Hanna Segal has spent decades probing the murkiest corners of the human psyche. She talks to Jon Henley about her search for truth, the healing power of art and what her years in practice have taught her about life
Hanna Segal opens the door at the second ring. She turned 90 two days previously and is small, creased and walnut-brown, with a crop of startling white hair and a pair of eyes that look suitably gimlet-like but are, she observes dispassionately, not much use to anyone these days.
"Like the rest of me, really," she adds.
"I haven't been analysed myself for a couple of years now, but I would love some help in coping with a body that's started to behave as if it were a psychotic infant. It's like some narcissistic baby. Nothing is good enough for it. Nothing is ever quite right."
Segal is one of the most eminent psychoanalysts ever to have practised in Britain. Splendidly, despite living in this country for nearly 70 years, she speaks English with a great, gutteral mittel-European accent. Even better, while she has been forced to abandon her beloved pipe, every few minutes she takes a small wad of tobacco from a tin at her elbow, pops it surreptitiously into her mouth, and chews. Who does that, these days? It is impossible not to warm to her.
Hers is rather a strange profession, though. All that poking around in the dark, walled-off corners of people's minds, hunting down explanations for bizarre adult behaviour in obscure childhood events that invariably involve breasts or toilets. A lot of people have no time for it.
Segal, obviously, does. "The more I think about it," she says, "the importance lies in seeking truth. Not 'The Truth' with a capital T, an omniscience, but truth that is the same as reality. All we are really looking for, in a patient on the couch, is a distinction between lies and truth."
She no longer has a couch in her study, although the room, on the ground floor of large house in north London, is suitably sombre and book-lined. She stopped seeing individual patients a couple of years ago, although she still supervises major cases, from all over the world, by telephone.
But the kind of people who came to see her were, she says, generally those who "seek to avoid truth, and so end up in delusion. What you are aiming to achieve is a change in the direction of the mind, a bend towards truth. And while all science aims at truth, psychoanalysis is unique in recognising that the search for truth is, in itself, therapeutic."
The latter phrase is one penned by Segal and colleagues for the obituary of Melanie Klein, of whose work Segal is pretty much universally recognised as the most prominent postwar interpreter. Kleinian psychoanalysis is one of the two main schools within the British Psychoanalytical Society, the other being Freudian (after Anna, Sigmund's daughter).