Book Review
Belief and Imagination:
Explorations in Psychoanalysis
by Ronald Britton
New Library of Psychoanalysis
Published by Taylor & Francis
Pb © 1999
ISBN/ISSN: 0-415-19438-5, Price: US $29.99, UK £17.99
To order:
www.psychoanalysis.org.uk/newlibr2.php
Review in JAPA vol 50 No 3, 2002 by
Howard Levine
'Belief and Imagination is a pleasure to read and a reward
to study.
It confirms the author's status as one of the foremost
contributors to
modern psychoanalytic theory and practice. It is a clear and
insightful
book rich in clinical, theoretical, and applied
psychoanalytic wisdom,
and should be a valuable addition to the library of any
psychoanalyst'.
Belief and Imagination brings together Ronald Britton's
writing on these subjects over the last 15 years, exploring
the concepts from a Kleinian perspective. The book covers the status of phantasies
in an individuals mind - are they facts or possibilities?;
how the notions of objectivity and subjectivity are
interrelated and have their origins in the Oedipal
triangle; how phantasies which are held to be products of
the imagination, can be accounted for in psychoanalytic
terms'. Britton also examines the relationship between
psychic reality and fictional writing, and the ways in which
belief, imagination and reality are explored in the works of
Wordsworth, Rilke, Milton and Blake.
Review by Marilyn Lawrence
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy 2000, vol 14, no 1, pp93-95.
This is one of the latest in the New Library of
Psychoanalysis, edited by Elizabeth Spillius. It is a deep
and complex book, many-layered and difficult to summarise.
Entitled Belief and Imagination, I think the sub-title more
aptly encompasses the range of the work. It is at once
hugely broad; a treatise on human nature. At the same time
it is a carefully focused book about the Oedipus complex.
Ronald Britton locates himself as a British post Kleinian.
It is perhaps this re-emphasis on the centrality of the
Oedipus situation in all fields of human endeavour, founded
on a more of less securely established loving relationship
with a primary maternal object, signified by Bion's notion
of containment, which marks out this increasingly
distinctive school of thought.
Although the product of fifteen years of work and bringing
together a number of previously published papers, the book
is a pleasingly integrated work.
For Britton, the 'epistemophilic impulse', the wish to know
and be known, is not a component of love and hate, but
rather a drive in itself, but mingled with and complicated
by the other two. The depressive position, as outlined by
Klein and the Oedipus situation are, for Britton
..'inextricably intertwined in such a way that one cannot be
resolved without the other; we resolve the Oedipus complex
by working through the depressive position and the
depressive position by working through the Oedipus complex.'
Throughout the book, Britton examines the different ways in
which belief masquerades as knowledge always acknowledging
the difficulty of giving up our beliefs and the work of
mourning which is required to do so. But what is
imagination? Where, psychically is it located? This question
resonates throughout the chapters. He presents his ideas on
the fundamental importance of finding triangular space, the
space which is encompassed by the parents relationship to
each other and to their children…. here we are on the trail
of the imagination.
Chapters 1 - 8 are essentially clinical accounts of our
attempts to evade the oedipus situation and the depressive
position. These chapters are a clinical tour de force and
touch and often build upon ideas which we have encountered
through the works of Segal, Joseph, Malcolm and Steiner.
Chapters 10 - 14 comprise an extraordinary application of
these ideas to the field of literature, in particular the
works of Wordsworth, Rilke, Milton and Blake.
At various points in the book, Britton refers to Donald
Winnicott's ideas, which as he says, have had an influence
parallel with that of the post Kleinians. In this series of
papers, Winnicott can be taken as Britton's interlocutor. He
examines Winnicott's view of transitional space and finds it
to be closer to anxiety free mother-infant space as distinct
from the less comfortable but ultimately safer position in
the space which the parents create together in their minds
for their child. In this sense, Winnicott's transitional
space, if used excessively would be in danger of becoming a
psychic retreat. Again and again, Britton stresses his own
contention, that it is adequate maternal containment which
makes the triangular space safe and creative rather than
malignant and empty. In this way, he seems to link with and
diverge from Winnicott time and again. One senses that he is
trying to locate Winnicott in relation to his own school of
thought and in the final chapter on Publication Anxiety, he
indeed looks in detail at the complex series of affiliations
and counter-affiliations which marked Winnicott's relations
to the Klein group in the 1950's. However, this is merely
history. It is in Chapter 13, Milton's destructive
narcissist or Blake's true self? in which I felt some real
progress had been made on the matter. In this intriguing
essay, he juxtaposes Milton's concept of evil with that of
Blake. For Milton, it is Satan, the proud, self-worshipping
narcissist who lures humankind away from it's knowledge of
its dependence on the Father. For Blake, in contrast, the
ills of mankind lay in the abandonment of the true authentic
self, in favour of a compliant and dependent relationship
with an idealised object. Britton sees these as analogous to
Rosenfeld's destructive narcissism and Winnicott's false
self, respectively.
For Britton, both are valid descriptions of linked though
distinct types of psychopathology encountered in the
consulting room. No problem thus far. But says Britton, when
these pathological situations are felt to be generalised,
when perhaps we begin even to reinterpret theory in the
light of them, then we might as psychoanalysts stop
observing our patients and instead get into disputes which
resemble the theological wrangles of the past. Britton
observes that our own beliefs about the past are bound to
influence the way we see things. If we believe in a period
of primary narcissism, we are more likely to see pathology
as linked to a false self development in the face of the
overwhelming impingement of external reality. If on the
other hand, we believe in the primacy of the object
relationship, we are more likely to perceive narcissism as a
problem. Britton stresses the difficulty which the false
self patients present in treatment. They are different and
more difficult he thinks than the 'as if' patients, for they
comprehend every attempt at objectivity on the part of the
analyst as an attack on their subjective selves. They seek
to convert the analyst to their way of thinking. The
alternative for them, is to be taken over and made subject
to the world view of another. In the countertransference, it
is common to feel 'changed' by such patients, a phenomenon
which Winnicott himself reports. The pressure from the
patient is always to change, to abandon the third position
and give up the true transitional or triangular space.
I find this a helpful and illuminating commentary on two
expositions of psychopathology which are often represented
quite independently of each other as though each leaves no
space for the other. While other writers may want to
disagree with some details, a bridge, a link, now exists.
The chapter I feel least at ease with is chapter 9, in which
Britton attempts to differentiate between those works of
fiction which are truth-seeking and those which seek to
evade truth. Truth seeking works, he argues are those which
emanate directly or indirectly from the infantile phantasy
or dream of the writer, while the truth-evading works of
fiction are based upon pleasure -seeking day dreams. While I
find his analysis of the creative process in Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein compelling, the whole project of dividing up
the sheep from the goats puts me in mind of the endless
squabbling within the Universities, about which are the
truly great works of literature and how one knows it, which
bedevilled English literature during my own undergraduate
days. I am uneasy at the dismissal of popular culture as
truth evading. Why is it that we can find aspects of popular
culture from the past, both religious and secular, to be
worthwhile, while we can find little or nothing of value in
our own? But this is the great joy of this book; it makes
one want to debate with Dr Britton, to put another view. One
wants to ask him what he thinks about this or that. It is
not a book which demands a slavish or unquestioning
admiration.
Admiration however, the book does call forth. It is in my
view both traditional and revolutionary. I will not discuss
the final chapter on publication anxiety, as for colleagues
who have not yet read the book, it would be to throw light
prematurely on a very lovely twilight corner. In the
tradition of the post Kleinians, Ronald Britton in Belief
and Imagination breaks new ground.
Review by Dr Anton Obholzer
If you're inclined to coast along with your well-worn
comfortable ideas and techniques, be warned: DO NOT read
this book - it could seriously damage your complacency and
alter professional self-perception to a discomforting
degree!
While clearly in the tradition of the work of the Klein
group, Britton is also discernibly himself, bringing to his
writing not only an in-depth knowledge of the leading
psychoanalysts of this century but combining it with the
richness of both British and continental literature and
philosophy,- a mix that is heady, multi-layered and uniquely
Britton.
His style is clear, easy to read and always illuminating,
both in terms of the concept and of the nuances of
reflection that it evokes. In the introduction, for example,
he covers concepts such as projective identification and
anxiety in an orthodox yet arresting new way that invites
one to have fresh thoughts about them.
In other chapters he takes everyday working concepts such as
Psychic Reality; Containment; the Depressive Position, along
with many ideas and configurations of his own, and offers
them up in a manner that is very thought-provoking and
stimulating.
Many book reviews end with a recommendation to read or to
buy the book. In this case a recommendation is not enough.
This book is essential reading for anyone wanting to keep
psychoanalytic thought alive and well.
To order:
www.psychoanalysis.org.uk/newlibr2.php