Symbol Formation, Destruction, and the Ritualised Mind: Listening to Hanna Segal in the Age of OCD

Lecture Transcript

Dr. Lewton – Year 1 UITS Trainee Seminar

Let us begin with this:

The capacity to symbolise is not given. It is earned.

Earned through developmental struggle, emotional loss, and the slow digestion of unbearable experiences.

Before we enter theory, a moment on the woman behind it.

A Life in Exile and Clarity

Hanna Segal was born in Poland in 1918.

Fascism chased her from her home. She escaped to Switzerland, then London, where she became one of Melanie Klein’s most trusted analysands and protégés.

Segal’s own early losses and the brutality of history shaped her sensitivity to what the mind must do when the world is intolerable.

She became known for clarity — not just in thought, but in clinical listening.

She died in 2011, but her formulations breathe through our work today.

Hanna Segal — perhaps Klein’s most lucid interpreter — tells us:

“Symbol formation is the ego’s attempt to represent what is absent, lost, or intolerably loved.”

A symbol is never just a sign.

A sign tells us what is — like a stop sign, or the ring of a phone.

But a symbol holds what is not there.

It is a presence formed in the shape of an absence.

And so: a symbol is born of mourning.

Let us pause here.

Why mourning?

Because to symbolise something, we must first bear that it is not us, not always here, not under our control.

The infant must discover that the breast is not an extension of her mouth.

That the mother can leave — and that she will not die.

That others exist. That love involves absence.

Symbolisation begins here — in that painful but liberating recognition: the world is not me.

Now think of the adolescent who cannot stop washing.

Not once. Not twice. But five times. Always five.

Why?

Because five has become a substitute — not for dirt, but for terror.

The ritual is not symbolic.

It is what Hanna Segal called a symbolic equation.

Let’s make this distinction clear.

Symbolic Representation vs Symbolic Equation

Segal teaches us:

• In symbolic representation, an object stands for another — but is known not to be it.

  
  

  This gap between the symbol and the thing symbolised is psychic space.

  
  

  It allows for thinking, feeling, and play.

  
  

  A child playing with a doll knows it is not a real baby — and precisely because they know this, they can begin to process emotions about dependency, care, rage, and love.

• In symbolic equation, the object is the thing.

  
  

  There is no gap, no distance, no space for reflection.

  
  

  The ritual is not like salvation. It is salvation.

  
  

  The hand is not feared as a source of germs. It is the danger.

  
  

  The soap is not a symbol of cleansing. It is the cure.

In symbolic equation, the psyche cannot tolerate absence.

It cannot imagine.

There is no ‘as if’ — only as is.

This is where we begin to understand the mind of obsessionality.

And this is where Segal becomes indispensable.

OCD is not, at its core, about logic gone wrong.

It is about symbolisation gone missing.

In Klein’s terms:

• The depressive position — where ambivalence is tolerated, and the object is seen as whole — is the birthplace of true symbols.

• But when this fails, the mind may regress to more primitive modes: splitting, projection, denial.

The obsessional ritual is not “irrational.”

It is a last-ditch structure to hold together a collapsing internal world.

Let’s now listen to Segal directly:

“In symbolic equation, there is no representation. There is no ‘as if.’ The symbol is the object — unmediated, untransformed.”

(Segal, 1957, “Notes on Symbol Formation”)

This line is clinically vital.

It helps us understand why CBT or ERP, when applied too early, can backfire.

If we treat the ritual as merely a symptom to extinguish —

without first understanding it as a structure of psychic survival,

then removing it is not healing.

It is catastrophe.

We destroy the scaffolding before the house has been built.

We take the crutch away before the leg has healed.

We remove the act — but leave the unbearable feeling untouched.

A Brief Note on Psychic Digestion

Let’s pause to define another crucial term: psychic digestion.

This is a Bionian phrase — and Segal was deeply attuned to it.

It refers to the mind’s capacity to take in raw emotional experience, metabolise it, and transform it into thought.

Without this, experience is either evacuated, denied, or acted out.

Most rituals in OCD function like undigested psychic contents — expelled, not symbolised.

What does this ask of us?

It asks us to become what Segal invites us to be:

Midwives to the symbol.

Not challengers of the act, but interpreters of its unspoken function.

Clinical Moment

A young person says:

“If I don’t do this, someone will die.”

The temptation — especially in manualised contexts — is to say:

“That’s irrational. Let’s challenge that belief.”

But Segal invites something else.

We listen beneath the act —

and respond:

“That sounds terrifying. I wonder if part of you feels responsible for something unbearable — and this is how your mind is trying to protect you.”

This is where symbolisation begins.

Not with interpretation, but with containment.

Not with dismantling, but with understanding.

Destruction and Symbolisation

Now — a deeper thread.

Segal followed Klein in seeing destruction not just as aggression,

but as an attack on symbolisation itself.

The adolescent who says, “Nothing matters”

is not being nihilistic.

They are showing us a wound — where thinking used to live.

The obsessional retreat can culminate in what Meltzer described as the claustrum — a sealed psychic environment where internal figures dominate and thinking is held hostage.

It is a refusal of symbolic space.

A mental world where nothing can be absent,

because everything must be controlled.

“If I control everything, nothing will be lost.”

This is the motto of the ritualised mind.

Segal gives us language to see through this structure —

to imagine psychic space again,

even in the scorched earth of obsession.

An Adolescent Example

A 14-year-old girl.

Ritual hand-washing. Severe contamination fears.

But beneath it?

A sibling, recently deceased.

Never spoken of.

Not once.

Instead:

“I think I brought germs in. I think it was my fault.”

The soap was not soap.

It was an attempt to wash away a death she could not mourn.

Not irrational.

Segalian.

A symbolic equation born of mourning denied.

What did we do?

We didn’t say, “Let’s stop washing.”

We said:

“Maybe your mind is trying to tell us something — something very sad, and very hard to feel.”

She cried. Once.

Then again.

And, eventually, she washed a little less.

Not because she was challenged.

Because she was seen.

To Conclude

Segal does not just help us work with symbol formation.

She helps us dignify its failure.

When young people with OCD lose the capacity to symbolise,

it is not defiance.

It is grief in disguise.

Let us not rush to remove the ritual.

Let us listen to it.

And in doing so, let us become what Segal hoped we would be:

Companions in the journey from equation to meaning.

Thank you.