ABSTRACT
As an adolescent, Hanna Segal read Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Civilization and its Discontents, so that she discovered Freud and the death drive at one and the same time. “That was when it clicked with me!” she says; she was immediately convinced of the value of Freud’s hypothesis. Freud found it extremely difficult to share with even his closest followers his firm belief that the conflict between the life and death drives plays a decisive role in mental life. Melanie Klein was the only one who took the idea seriously enough to make use of it in her clinical work. Since qualifying as a psychoanalyst, Segal has never ceased to emphasize the usefulness of that hypothesis for the clinical practice of psychoanalysis. She maintains, of course, that she has not contributed anything particularly new to the concept in comparison with Freud and Klein; nonetheless her real contribution lies in her efforts to share her firm belief in its validity with other psychoanalysts, several of whom continue to question the importance of the fundamental conflict between the life and death drives.
