Dr Hanna Segal
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 July 2006
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the psychoanalyst Dr Hanna Segal. Hanna Segal is one of the most distinguished psychoanalysts of our time. She was born in Poland at the end of the First World War and after a sometimes difficult childhood her family moved to Switzerland and then France to flee the Nazis. They ended up on a Polish troop ship that brought them to Britain just in time, as she says, for the Blitz.
As a teenager she was passionate about aesthetics and politics but did not know how how to combine her passions in a career - once she discovered the work of Sigmund Freud she knew her calling lay in psychoanalysis. Her mentor was Melanie Klein and she wrote what has become a standard text about her work. Dr Segal has written too about psychoanalysis and aesthetics and our response to the threat posed by nuclear weapons. She has held the post of Freud Professor at University College London and is a past president of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Now aged 87, she continues to work overseeing student analysts and giving seminars.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: 2nd movement of String Quartet in C Minor by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Book: In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust Luxury: A snorkel and Polaroids
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 2006, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a psycho analyst. By her own admission she's always had more luck than wisdom, but that hasn't prevented |
| 0:35.9 | her becoming one of the most distinguished psychological theorists of our time. She's made important |
| 0:41.3 | contributions to the psychoanalysis of children, as well as the theory of |
| 0:45.1 | symbolism, aesthetics, literature and politics. |
| 0:48.8 | Born at the end of the First World War, she was brought up in difficult circumstances in Poland. |
| 0:54.4 | Her family fled the Nazis via Paris, arriving in this country in 1940, just in time for |
| 1:00.6 | the Blitz, as she puts it. Now 87 and a former Freud professor at University |
| 1:06.3 | College London she says of her career I wanted to be of social use in the world. |
| 1:11.9 | Analysis was an answer to my dreams because my basic interest |
| 1:16.2 | is in people and in human minds. She is Hannah Siegel. |
| 1:21.7 | Hannah, it was Freud, I think, who said that it was the ambition of psychoanalysis to, I quote, |
| 1:27.0 | transform neurotic misery into common unhappiness. |
| 1:31.0 | On that basis, you must have made a lot of people unhappy in your time I take it. |
| 1:35.0 | In a way yes, but picture for me from my early days when I did a lot of supervision in California in particular man married to children |
| 1:50.2 | house miserable as hell. he doesn't know why. |
| 1:54.0 | Rushing around, buying this, buying that, |
| 1:58.0 | behind that, terrible fear of a severe depressive breakdown because his life, internal life was empty. |
| 2:07.0 | So what you're saying really is being unhappy is as important to our existence as being happy? |
| 2:14.8 | The pressure is completely normal and the person can be very creative. |
| 2:20.6 | Would you go as far as to say that all of us would benefit from psychoanalysis? |
... |
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