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Belief and Imagination rightly and thoroughly embeds psychoanalysis in the wider culture of literature and philosophy. Without claiming for it any special status, Ron Britton explores both what contemporary psychoanalysis can offer to broader discussions about creativity and epistemology and, of equal importance, what it can learn from such discussions. A psychoanalytic text that so fully engages with concepts which underlie the enduring problems of human existence is certainly to be welcomed.
Britton gathers together questions and ideas which he has been formulating, publishing and elaborating over the last decade and a half. Interestingly, although many of the topics were originally written for very different audiences or readerships, they have a distinctive coherence of a kind perhaps recognizable to those who, re-visiting work which may date back many years, discover that they have always been compelled towards the same quandaries and preoccupations. Britton's preoccupations turn out to be with two of the most central and problematic concepts in Western thought, or at least with what place these concepts have in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis and vice versa.
Britton opens the book with some searching questions: ‘What is and where is the Imagination in any modern model of the Mind?’, ‘How can we conceive of it in psychoanalytic terms?’, ‘What is the relationship between belief and knowledge?’ Such questions, of their very nature, have no straightforward answers and Britton, on the whole, explores and suggests rather than asserts. This kind of suggestiveness finds ways of opening up new territory and engendering enthusiasm for further penetration. His challenging interrogatives are interwoven with several other areas of interest. Most pervasive of these is the ‘presence of