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Belief and Imagination is written within a contemporary Kleinian framework, but it should be accessible to analysts of any persuasion. The starting point for these explorations is a set of questions that unify and inform a wide range of subjects of analytic interest: 1) What is “the status of phantasies in the mind of the individual? … When are they regarded as facts, probabilities, possibilities or mere fancies?” (p. 1); What is the “internal relationship of subjectivity to objectivity” (p. 1) and how does it originate and develop in the primitive oedipal triangle; and 3) What and where is the Imagination, and how is it to be construed in any modern model of the mind?
Intrinsic to these questions is the individual's relationship to knowledge, the search for which Britton accords full instinctual status: “I regard the epistemophilic instinct (Wissentrieb) to be on a par with and independent of the other instincts.… The desire for knowledge exists alongside love and hate. Human beings have an urge to love, to hate, to know, and a desire to be loved, a fear of being hated, and a wish to be understood.… Belief, as an act, is in the realm of knowledge what attachment is in the realm of love” (pp. 11-12).
Knowledge, however, can be oriented toward and used in the service of either phantasy or reality. Britton emphasizes the importance of our individual capacities to accept and acknowledge whatever degree of uncertainty may inhere in what we “know.” Thus, he proffers belief as a more humble form of knowing than fact, and he suggests that our awareness that what we possess is a belief rather than a fact is a function of how well we can accept limits on our omniscient grandiosity: “Claiming to know something means that one asserts that it is incontrovertibly true, whereas stating that one believes something is saying that one takes it to be true but accepts the possibility that it may