Hanna Segal

She married mathematician Paul Segal in 1946. He died in 1996. There were three sons of the marriage: Michael a civil servant, mathematician Dan, and philosopher Gabriel.

Hanna Segal was born into a middle class Jewish family in Łódź, Poland. She had begun her medical studies at Warsaw University where the family had moved. She was politically involved with the Polish Socialist Party. When Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, she was fortuitously on holiday in France from where she had to flee arriving in Great Britain (via Switzerland). She completed her medical studies in the wartime Polish medical department at Edinburgh University. She next undertook psychoanalytic training in London, and an analysis first with David Matthews, a pupil of Melanie Klein, and later with Klein herself whose close follower she became and whose work she went on to expound with clarity. It is said that without Segal's introductory works, Klein would not have become so famous, and would certainly have been far less accessible to the reader.

Hanna Segal (born Hanna Poznańska; 20 August 1918 – 5 July 2011) was a British psychoanalyst of Polish descent and a follower of Melanie Klein. She was president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, vice-president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and was appointed to the Freud Memorial Chair at University College, London (UCL) in 1987. The American psychoanalyst James Grotstein considered that "received wisdom suggests that she is the doyen of "classical" Kleinian thinking and technique." The BBC broadcaster Sue Lawley introduced her as "one of the most distinguished psychological theorists of our time,"