Reflections on the work of Hanna Segal (1918–2011),

This paper is based on a talk given at the conference to celebrate the Work of Hanna Segal and attempts to summarise her contribution to psychoanalysis. I suggest that in addition to being the important presenter of the work of Melanie Klein, she made major contributions to our understanding of many analytic ideas, for example, symbol formation, the usefulness of the concept of the death instinct and the relation between phantasy and reality. She was a pioneer in the analytic treatment of psychosis and sh wrote important papers on literature and aesthetics. She was a great teacher and emphasised the central role played by the analytic setting in representing the attitude of the analyst.     

‘The child's past in the adult's present’: The trauma of the Siege of Leningrad (1941–1944)

This study deals with the individual and collective memory of Leningrad Siege survivors who experienced mass and prolonged wartime trauma during childhood (1941–44). While much has been published about the Siege, there has to date been no investigation by psychologists into the effects of extreme deprivation on Siege victims apart from one pilot study (Gulina et al., 2005). This study is still underway. Interviews with 80 participants (68 female and 12 male) are analysed and discussed here. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and content analysis are utilized. Unpublished archival writings by children caught in the Siege have been analysed. The principal method of interpretation is based on a psychoanalytic understanding of child development, mourning and the metabolizing of traumatic experience. The subjective meaning of the Siege experience to individual children is considered     

Automatic Behavior – Its Social Embedding and Individual Consequences

Automatic behavior, that is, the non‐conscious activation of perceiver behavior by social category priming, has undergone considerable development in the recent years. While initial effects pointed to often rather surprising effects that could be characterized as imitation of the behavior of the social category itself, current research unfolds a much more complex picture. Not only imitative behavior but, contrasting, also response behavior is getting activated. Response behavior is fundamentally different from imitation and contrast and denotes behavior that is directed toward the social category out of the action ecology of the perceiver. Furthermore, boundary conditions have been established and could reveal that motivation (goals) and social context modulate the selection of specific automatic responses. Most recent findings reveal that social category priming embedded in context also modulates visual attention patterns pertaining to means functional for the response behavior. Similar to the increased complexity of findings, the proposed underlying explanatory models have developed in comprehensiveness. Taken together, automatic behavior now has to be seen as a valid form of social influence, and its benefits and pitfalls are further to be investigated.