From Separateness - to Symbol Formation - to Sublimation: Finding Meaning

Edith Hargreaves

It sprang from my interest and puzzlement about a particular group of patients who, although highly educated and successful in their working lives, have difficulty in forming intimate relationships and have few interests and little joy in life.  Following Hanna Segal’s ideas on symbol formation, I relate this to their difficulties in bearing separateness and mourning loss, i.e. in negotiating the depressive position, and, therefore, in finding ways to transform painful anxieties and conflicts symbolically into creative and sustaining sublimations – interests, activities and relationships in the external world.”

Edith Hargreaves is a Training Analyst of the British Psychoanalytic Society with a particular interest in teaching psychoanalytic ideas and supervising clinical work.  She has been actively involved for many years in the training organisations of the Institute of Psychoanalysis and other psychoanalytic-psychotherapy organisations and is committed to the strengthening of psychoanalysis outside London, and the application of psychoanalytic ideas in the NHS. For the past five years she has taken part in week long teaching seminars in the Ukraine. She is co-editor of In Pursuit of Psychic Change: The Betty Joseph Workshop, Brunner-Routledge, 1994.