Dream, Phantasy and Art

Drawing together papers written across four decades, the book sets out how dreaming, unconscious phantasy and symbol formation belong to a single developmental process. Segal treats the dream as a form of unconscious phantasy at work in sleep, and reads its capacity to represent, rather than merely discharge experience, as a marker of psychic health.

Central to the argument is the distinction between the symbolic equation, in which the symbol is felt to be the thing itself, and true symbolism, in which the symbol stands for the object while remaining separate from it. Segal ties this achievement to the depressive position and to the mourning that lets an internal object be given up and recreated in symbolic form. Creativity, on this account, grows from the wish to repair and restore a damaged internal world.

For the clinician, it offers a way of listening to dreams and to blocked symbolisation as evidence of how far a patient can bear separateness and loss.