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Psychoanalyst, examines the struggle between the forces of life and destruction

Hanna Segal, who died at the age of 93 has belonged to a handful of psychoanalysts, the international supremacy was undisputed. They made fundamental contributions to psychoanalytic theory and practice and in the course of a career of more than 60 years, was the leading representative of the ideas of Melanie Klein.

Segal developed the theory of symbolism, the understanding of the nature of creativity, and the establishment of a psychoanalytic approach to severe disorders, including psychosis. She was also their understanding of how the imagination (unconscious fantasy) and for its detailed elaboration of the inner struggle between the forces that strive for subsistence and development, and those who move known to destruction.

Segal, Herbert Rosenfeld, Wilfred Bion, Betty Joseph formed a small group of big thinkers, whose influence remained central to the development of psychoanalysis, but Segal was clearly in that group, because down in the tradition according to Sigmund Freud, cupping her work a very wide margin. They could demonstrate the relevance of psychoanalytic thinking to human knowledge in general, and that made her work known outside of psychoanalysis.

She was born Hanna Poznanska, into a highly cultured family in ??dz?, Poland. Her father, Czeslaw, was a barrister, an art critic and a newspaper editor. In the early days, Hanna's mother, Isabella, lived the life of a typical bourgeois lady but, when life took a downward turn, her strength and resourcefulness became manifest. The family moved to Geneva, although Hanna returned to Warsaw to complete her education.

By her late teens she had already read all of Freud, who had been translated into Polish. Other early intellectual influences include Voltaire, Rousseau, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Proust, Pascal. As a witness in both poverty and the lack of political freedom, she joined the Polish Socialist Party and its involvement on the left side in the course of their lives away. Psychoanalysis was, as she put it, "\ a godsend," as in him they found a way of combining their deepest intellectual interests with her desire to help people.

The rise of fascism saw the expulsion of their father from Switzerland, and the family, now stateless and impoverished, the resident of Paris, where Hanna to them in 1939. In 1940, they again fled, this time for the United Kingdom, where Hanna completed her medical studies in London and Edinburgh. In Edinburgh, she met the psychoanalyst WRD Fairbairn, which determines the future course of their lives. After completing her medical training, she moved to London, where she played an important role in the rehabilitation of the mentally ill Polish soldiers. She was accepted for training at the British Psychoanalytic Society and entered into analysis with Klein, completing her training in 1945 at the young age of 27 years. The analysis with Klein was central to their development. The year 1946-47 was exceptional as she is married to the mathematician Paul Segal, conceived their first child, and presented her first work, a psychoanalytic contribution to the aesthetics of the British Psychoanalytic Society.

Shortly after she qualified, she trained as a child analyst who has the care of Paula Heimann, Esther Bick and small, and began to teach students at the Institute for Psychoanalysis. Her first book, Introduction to the work of Melanie Klein (1964), in which small \ s own patient's ideas by clinical material from Segal \ were shown, "was and remains a standard work. Her second book, Klein (1969), in the Fontana Modern Masters series, was also an homage to Freud and Klein. This series was intended for a popular audience and put small Segal 's work in context by reviewing Freud' s contribution and show how Klein This built and expanded it.

In 1952 she became a training analyst and an active private practice built with a variety of patients, including candidates in training, psychotic patients and even some artists who sought help because they were obstructed in their work. This enabled her use of her interest in creativity, art and literature to make, and led to the publication of a psychoanalytic contribution to aesthetics, their now famous paper, which remains perhaps the original attempt at a psychoanalytic understanding of creativity.

In this paper, Segal does not confine itself to a study on the psychology of the artist. It showed the contribution of psychoanalysis to the understanding of aesthetic issues. Segal is the ability to '\ s work and the audience' in the middle of the artist \ s mourn aesthetic response. From this perspective, works of art derive their aesthetic depth of this inner struggle, the work itself, there is substance and form an act of reparation.

During this period, Segal wrote her groundbreaking work on symbolism, references to the symbol formation (International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1957), in which they distinguish between primitive and advanced forms of symbolic function, brings a necessary clarification to understand more disturbed states of mind. Many of the works in this very productive were written in her third book, The Work of Hanna Segal (1981), reprinted, during their fourth, Dream, Phantasy and Art (1991), examined anew the interpretation of dreams and goes on this way in-depth discussion of fantasy and symbolism.

The developments in psychoanalytic theory have been combined with her interest in literature and politics in psychoanalysis, literature and war (1997). The paper of the clinical usefulness of the concept of the Death Instinct (1993, International Journal of Psychoanalysis), published in this volume describes the way the balance between life and death instinct determines the individual 's attitude to reality, as exemplified the two possible reactions to states need. One who pushed the survival instinct, life is object-seeking and-seeking, leading to an attempt to satisfy these needs in the real world to be met, possibly due to aggressive pursuit. The other, under the influence of the death instinct, has destroyed the target, experiences on the need and the emotional pain that goes with it. Here the self, or that part of the self are in a position to pain, inhibited or destroyed and, instead of depending on the reality that the patient is too omnipotent fantasy as a solution and leads to a highly restricted life.

In her sixth and final book, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (2010), Segal contain a fascinating discussion of the Eden myth presented by Milton in Paradise Lost. She argued that for humans, the Expulsion from Paradise, but again that is a return to the reality of everyday life. However, catches Milton 's unsettling account human response to exclusion - Satan filled with envy devoted to a deterioration of quality and, above all, creativity.

Segal believed that the psychoanalytic understanding of the distribution of our destructiveness and human costs of their denial may, in an important way to contribute to socio-political issues. Although she was criticized for its political engagement, some suggesting it went against the neutrality that characterizes psychoanalysis, she believed this was based on a misunderstanding. Psychoanalytic neutrality, she claims, is a clinical course for practice and needs of "that are self-castration as a citizen 'can be distinguished. Here she was clearly in the tradition of Freud.

She was one of the driving forces behind the founding of a psychoanalytic movement against nuclear weapons. Your paper is the silence of Real Crime (International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 1987) remains one of the most important psychoanalytic contributions to the nuclear dispute. After the end of the Cold War, they expressed the fear that the West would not manage without the continuation of an enemy, his paranoid system of thought and fuel they saw the post 9 / 11 context and the Gulf War from this perspective. In 2006 she wrote: "What does the future it is quite dark, because the global oppression, which includes the mass murder and a total economic exploitation leaves, almost desperate terrorism as the only weapon for the oppressed ... The world's expanding? Empire, like all these things has to be maintained by controlling the media -. and this is of necessity based on a series of lies from the human (and psychoanalytic) perspective, we conducted a citizen with the endless task is to suspend campaign for the maintenance of healthy human values ??- that's our only hope ".

Segal served as President of the British Psychoanalytic Society from 1977 to 1980 and as Vice-President of the International Psychoanalytic Association on two occasions. She was a visiting professor at University College London in the years 1987-88. In 1992 she received the Maria S Sigourney Award for contributions to psychoanalysis.

Throughout her life, Segal had a deep passion for literature, including detective stories, and wrote papers on the novels of Joseph Conrad, Patrick White and William Golding. She was proud of her family, and followed her remarkable success and shared their concerns. Her husband, Paul, died 1996; Segal is survived by three sons, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

• Born Mary Hanna Segal, Psychoanalyst, 20 August 1918 and died 5th July 2011

• Queen of Darkness, Jon Henley 's interview with Hanna Segal at the time of her 90th Birthday