ABSTRACT
This brief, informal interview with the psychoanalyst Hanna Segal, who had recently celebrated her eightieth birthday, took place in London in April 1999. Hanna Segal is well known as the most prominent and lucid post-war interpreter of the work of Melanie Klein; she is the author, for instance, of the widely read Fontana ‘Modern Master’ on Klein. Over the last fifty years,1 Segal’s many papers, essays and books have explored the nature of her own psychoanalytic experience and made important conceptual contributions, for instance regarding the nature of unconscious phantasy, the clinical relevance of the death instinct, and the psychic consequences of the capacity (or lack of it) to use symbols. She has investigated the wider
applications of psychoanalytic ideas in diverse fields, notably aesthetics, politics and literature.
