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In Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis, Ronald Britton presents us with an important work. He does so in a style that is admirably inclusive, avoiding those pitfalls of abstruseness and impenetrability which sometimes mar the contributions of other writers who may be affected by those very issues connected with publication anxiety that he discusses and develops so interestingly in his final chapter. His central thesis is that, alongside the love and hate instincts familiar to us, there is a separate instinct for knowledge which contributes its own complications in the development of the individual. He sees belief as a component of the instinct for knowledge, necessary to us so that we can, as he puts it, act and react in the world, often in the absence of actual knowledge. One of the conflicts the individual must face in relation to his or her beliefs is that they may collapse in the light of experience which affords knowledge. When a belief fails under the impact of reality the individual needs to mourn its loss, which may become a central task in the therapeutic relationship, taken up in the process of working through.
Britton is to be admired for the clarity with which he develops and presents his argument against the sequence of theoretical development traced from Freud through Klein, Bion, Winnicott and others. One has the sense of a writer who troubles to make plain the difficult concepts he is developing. Indeed the overall impression is of a well-crafted book, which manages to introduce a significant contribution to the psychoanalytic paradigm which is both theoretically intelligent and likely to be clinically applicable. His description of the instinct for knowledge, and his anatomizing of the components of belief and imagination are welcome presentations of concepts which the practising psychotherapist will find helpful. He methodically develops and integrates his insights within the existing psychoanalytic paradigm, especially with refer