ABSTRACT
As an adolescent, Hanna Segal was already passionately interested in art and literature. It is therefore hardly surprising that she devoted her first paper on psychoanalysis to that topic. “A psycho-analytical approach to aesthetics” was originally her dissertation paper for qualification as an associate member of the British Psychoanalytical Society; it was published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis five years later, in 1952. That paper was immediately seen to be a significant contribution to the the study of psychoanalysis and aesthetics. For Segal, the crucial issue that artistic creativity evokes is that of understanding how and by what means artists succeed in making emotional contact with the general public and in triggering an aesthetic response. Freud had discussed the question only passim. Segal took as her starting point Melanie Klein’s work and her own clinical observations. She had discovered in the analysis of several artists suffering from inhibitions as regards their creative capacities that their inability to play freely with symbols was linked to the impossibility that they experienced with respect to the work of mourning. She suggested that working through the depressive position plays a decisive role in the symbol-formation processes that lie at the heart of the creative impulse.
