Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis

This book comprises Ronald Britton's writing on the subject of belief over the last fifteen years, exploring the concepts of belief and imagination from a Kleinian perspective. Among the topics covered is the status of fantasies in an individual's mind; how the notions of objectivity and subjectivity are interrelated and have their origins in the Oedipal triangle; and how fantasies which are held to be products of the imagination can be accounted for in psychoanalytic terms. As well as exploring the various aspects of belief encountered in analysis, Britton also examines the relationship between psychic reality and fictional writing, and the ways in which the issues of belief, imagination and reality are explored in the works of Wordsworth, Rilke, Milton and Blake.