Ronald Britton. Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis. London and NY: Roultledge (1998)
I would make the distinction between beliefs that have merely been surmounted or apparently outgrown and those that have been worked through and relinquished. It is relinquishment that is necessary for psychic change, and this takes time, needs working through and entails mourning for a lost belief like mourning for a lost object. A belief that has been surmounted I regard as one simply overcome by another belief which itself remains dependent on the prevailing context. It is then like believing one thing when in company and in daylight and another when alone in the dark.
P. 90
In a chapter (‘Reality and unreality in phantasy and fiction’, in E.S.Person, P.Fonagy and S.A.Figueira (eds) On Freud’s ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press) that I wrote for a book on modern psychoanalytic views of Freud’s ‘Creative writers and daydreaming’ (‘Creative writers and day-dreaming’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. IX, London: Hogarth Press (1950–74) my criticism of Freud’s paper was that it did not adequately differentiate between the truth-seeking function of some fiction and the truth-evading function of other fiction, that is, between serious creative writing and escapist literature: ‘The difference between essentially truthful fiction and intentionally untruthful fiction can be accounted for once the concept of phantasy is enlarged beyond the wish fulfilling daydream’ (‘Reality and unreality in phantasy and fiction’, in E.S.Person, P.Fonagy and S.A.Figueira (eds) On Freud’s ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
P. 109
I think an important aspect of this concept [phantasy. – T.] which got lost in the ‘Controversial Discussions’ and in Susan Isaacs paper [‘The nature and function of phantasy’. – T.] is the distinction between infantile phantasies based on, or accompanying, actual experience (e.g. hunger pain as a biting object) and infantile phantasies conjured up to deny experience (a hallucinatory gratifying object). In part, this was because Klein had not yet introduced her theory of the paranoidschizoid position and her concept of projective identification. Much was to follow which elucidated the ways in which unconscious phantasy is variously experienced and expressed, particularly by the work of Hanna Segal.
P. 110
Both these kinds of phantasy, of an ideal object as the source of goodness (based on somatic satisfaction) and of a bad object as the source of evil (based on somatic suffering), are in the mode of the paranoid-schizoid position. The hallucinatory wish-fulfilling object, with its function of the denial of loss by the omnipotent assertion of gain, is the forerunner of the manic defence.
In the mode of the depressive position, with the relinquishment of omnipotence and the notion of continuity the object can be felt to exist elsewhere in its absence. The suffering is felt to arise within the self as a consequence of something missing. When the absence of the object is recognised the place that the object originally occupied and left behind is experienced as space. If this space is felt to contain the promise of the return of the object it is felt to be benign, if idealised sacred. If, in contrast to this benign expectancy, it is believed that the space itself eliminates good objects—as an astronomical black hole eliminates matter—it is felt to be a malign space, possibly life-annihilating. The belief in benign space depends ultimately on the love for the object surviving its absence; thus a place is kept for the object’s return. […] In contrast, malignant space arises when the idea of the object continuing to exist in its absence cannot be tolerated because it causes so much suffering. The object therefore is, in phantasy, annihilated. As a consequence of this, the space left by the object is presumed to be the cause of the objects disappearance and not simply to have been created by its absence. Hence a phantasy comes into existence of an object-destructive space.
Clinically, this gives rise to terror of space, external or internal, which leads to obsessive manipulation of space and time in order to eliminate the danger of gaps appearing in the external world, and compulsive spacefilling mental activity to eradicate any gaps in psychic space. Some of this mental gap-filling is accomplished by auto-erotically based phantasy.
Klein did not regard auto-erotism as a preliminary stage of development but as co-existent with object-related activity, offering a compensatory alternative to or refuge from frustration or distressing sensations such as hunger. I think the phantasies associated with auto-erotic activity form the basis for hallucinatory gratification, and the line of phantasy development that stems from that primitive beginning reaches into the type of phantasies that Freud refers to as daydreams in his paper ‘Creative writers and daydreaming’ (‘Creative writers and day-dreaming’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. IX, London: Hogarth Press (1950–74). In wishful psychosis the deficit is denied by hallucinating the missing object, or by a delusion of being it.
Even when external reality is respected, auto-erotically-based phantasies may exist in parallel with a realistic attitude, as daydreams, in what Freud liked to describe as a reservation. He suggested in ‘Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning’ that ‘with the introduction of the reality principle one species of thought-activity was split off’. He compares this psychic retreat with a Natural Park […].
Pp. 111-2
One could say that the more fictional writing resembles obvious daydreaming, the less weight it has, and the more it resembles real dreaming, the more seriously we take it.
P. 113
[…] the imagination as a place in the mind where unwitnessed events take place is in origin the phantasised primal scene. In the next chapter this mental space is called the ‘other room’.
P. 117
The power of fiction lies in the truth it contains, which is not historical or material but psychic truth; fiction can express the truth just as facts can be used against it. This is not material truth based on correspondence with external reality, but psychic truth based on its correspondence with psychic reality. Clinically, just as we meet denial in relation to external events, so we meet denial in relation to internal events. In writing we find at times falsification of the external world, but it is probable that falsification of the internal world is even more common.
P. 118
Since the decline of religion, art has assumed a more significant role as the provider of a shared area, outside the self, for the symbolic representation of those forever unseen unconscious phantasies that are the bedrock of psychic reality—the psychic counterparts to Kant’s noumena, the unknowable things in themselves. In my opinion, literature and the arts, at their best, are attempting to realise what is most profoundly internal in the external.
There is a place for escapism in literature as in life, just as there is a place for dreamless sleep. Freud’s reservation for the preservation of wishful thinking, or Winnicott’s resting place of illusion can be provided by books, films, the theatre and television, but these resting places are not staging posts on the way to fulfilment in life or satisfaction in literature. They are species of what John Steiner (1993) has called psychic retreats, which if taken to be permanent areas of refuge become pathological organisations. If used excessively, escapist fiction in such forms as soap opera becomes just such a refuge, with the element of addiction that characterises such psychic retreats.
P. 119
In his writings on ‘transitional phenomena’ Winnicott described a mental space as arising by the mutual consent of the two persons of the dyadic relationship of mother-infant; he conceived it as a sort of no-man’s land between subject and object, a neutral zone for illusion (‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena’, Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis, London: Hogarth Press (1987). Where I differ from this is in seeing it as arising from within triadic triangular space. I said in Chapter 4 that I think triangular space originates when a position comes into existence from which one can be an observer of a relationship between two others. What I am suggesting in this chapter is that the ‘other room’ of the imagination comes into existence when this relationship is invisible. It is, in other words, the location of the unwitnessed primal scene. I think the quintessential primal scene is not observed but imagined, that it is the activity we believe takes place in our absence between our primary object and the other member of what we have come to call the Oedipal triangle. The invisible primal scene is populated only by our imagination; it is the space for fiction.
P. 121
When we claim to be one of the ‘happy pair’ we rid ourselves by projection of that aspect of ourselves which is forever ‘unfulfilled with pain of longing’, and with it we project our potential for envy and jealousy. Having done so, we fear the envy of others, become anxious with success and prone to placation by sacrifice or renunciation. Clinically, this is familiar and frequent in analysis in various intensities, and in various forms of negative therapeutic reaction we pay a sacrificial price for our good fortune. You will have noticed that I described this as happening when we claim to be one of the happy pair, that is, not just one of a happy pair but one of the happy pair, one of the primal couple.
We can never be the participants in our own phantasised primal scene; nor can we ever occupy a place in that ‘other room’ where our objects meet in our absence. If we claim to have a place in our own imagined primal scene—to be one or the other, or both, members of the primal couple—we do so by projective identification, thus creating an illusion designed to protect us from the jealousy and envy intrinsic to the Oedipus situation. By becoming one of a parental couple we do not become one of our own parents; nor by sharing a nuptial bed do we become participants in what is forever the primal scene of our internal parents. Similarly, by becoming analysts we do not finally become the analyst of our own transference phantasies. If, as is not uncommon, this illusion is buttressed by actual success, then I think the real achievement is felt to be stolen property or false goods, and therefore the occasion of depressive guilt, manic assertiveness or persecutory anxiety. […]
Sometimes the idealised parental sexuality is claimed for the self by projective identification with one or other of the primal couple. This last use of the primal scene, I think, gives rise to hysteria, with its histrionic sexuality and erotisation of most of life’s transactions.
Pp. 123-4
There are two other clinical situations that I think the concept of the ‘other room’ throws some light on. In one the ‘other room’ remains a distant unexplored place ignored and free of phantasies. The result is that the individual is described as ‘lacking in imagination’. In the second, in contrast, the dividing psychic wall of distinction between ‘this room’ and the ‘other room’, the perceived and the imagined, has collapsed. At these times such patients take the room they share with the analyst to be the ‘other room’, and whatever phantasies they might have about events taking place in the ‘other room’ they presume are taking place in the consulting room. […]
Just as triangular space collapses into a dyadic mode of two psychic dimensions, leaving no room for reflective thought, as I described in Chapter 4, so no mental space exists for non-consequential phantasy about events in absentia. In such circumstances here and there, like now and then, collapse into one time-space. Everything the primary object does is done in a dyadic mode, whether it is done in the presence or the absence of the self; there is no conception of an independent relationship with a third object and therefore everything that the object does is done for or against the self.
Pp. 125-6
I suggested in Chapter 1 that pathological organisations are sustained by counter-belief systems which organise present and future knowledge in such a way as to protect the individual from his or her own latent beliefs. These counter-belief systems are most pronounced and vehemently articulated when they are believed by the individual to be the only barrier between the individual and a catastrophe producing psychic chaos or a mental abyss. This chaos is felt to be kept at bay only by the continuous affirmation of the counter-belief system, and anything that is likely to throw doubt on that belief system has to be violently resisted.
Pp. 193-4
[Emphasis in original]