ABSTRACT
Melanie Klein’s paper on ‘The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego’, published in 1930, was a milestone in two respects: first, it opened up the study of symbolisation as a creative and developmental process. Second, it showed how abnormalities in the ability to form symbols could cripple the development of the ego. Hanna Segal’s work on the disorders of symbol formation has led to a greater understanding of the creative use of symbols as well. In her paper on ‘Delusion and artistic creativity’, she uses the material of William Golding’s novel The Spire to investigate the nature of creativity. Segal illustrates what she means by the fate of the projective identification with a clinical example of a man who had an extremely vivid and frightening dream, almost indistinguishable from a hallucination, of a motorcyclist riding into his forehead.
