ABSTRACT

Winner of the 2013 Sigourney Award!

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.

chapter 1|11 pages

Belief and psychic reality

chapter 2|10 pages

Naming and containing

chapter 3|12 pages

Oedipus in the depressive position

chapter 7|15 pages

Complacency in analysis and everyday life

chapter 9|11 pages

Daydream, phantasy and fiction

chapter 10|8 pages

The other room and poetic space

chapter 12|20 pages

Existential anxiety: Rilke’s Duino Elegies

chapter 14|19 pages

William Blake and epistemic narcissism

chapter 15|14 pages

Publication anxiety