ABSTRACT
Jacqueline Rose: Could you say something about what first attracted you to psychoanalysis and specifically to the work of Melanie Klein?
Hanna Segal: It is very difficult to identify again with one’s adolescent self. I was lucky in that I had access to psychoanalytic literature from when I was very young. I had read everything by Freud that was translated into Polish or French, which wasn’t an awful lot, by the time I was seventeen and I was always fascinated by analysis. A book that influenced me enormously was René Laforgue’s book on Baudelaire.As I grew older I had to reconcile three things I was interested in. One was art and literature; the other was politics – well, politics is a nasty word, I never wanted to be a politician – but social concerns, left-wing politics, prison reform and things like that; and interest in working with people. So psychoanalysis was an answer to my prayers because you could work with people, it gave me an approach to the social problems (I must have read Civilisation and its Discontents279 which I think was one of the translated texts) and it allowed for my interest in art and literature.Actually, analysis
for me was a second choice, what I really wanted was to be a novelist – not a poet, not a musician – but a novelist, because writing novels really covers the same area of my interests, but I did not think I had enough talent or inventiveness for that and psychoanalysis was the next best thing.
