Belief and Imagination
On belief, imagination and the third position; a modern classic.
Belief and Imagination gathers papers Ronald Britton wrote across fifteen years and works them into a sustained argument about how the mind grants reality to its own contents. Writing from a Kleinian and post-Bionian position, Britton treats belief as a distinct psychic function: the act by which a phantasy or idea is granted the status of fact, and held as true even while its untruth remains thinkable.
From this he develops the third position, the vantage within a triangular psychic space from which a person can watch themselves in relation to an idea or an object. He ties its emergence to the Oedipal situation, where tolerating a link between two others makes room for self-observation and for a reality that is not simply one's own.
For the clinician, the book gives a vocabulary for beliefs held with delusional force, for the collapse of triangular space in the consulting room, and for the analytic reading of literary imagination in Wordsworth, Rilke, Milton, and Blake.
About the author
Ronald Britton
Ronald Britton (born 1932) is a British psychoanalyst who trained first as a doctor and child psychiatrist before qualifying with the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1979, where he became a training and supervising analyst. Working in the Kleinian tradition, he chaired the Department of Children and Parents at the Tavistock Clinic. He is known for the concepts of the third position and triangular space, the internal Oedipal structure through which a person observes relationships, and for the books Belief and Imagination and Sex, Death, and the Superego.
Details
- 1998
- Routledge
- Routledge
- 240
- 9780415194389