Introduction

We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things.

This book is based on papers written over a period of fifteen years on a variety of subjects but with the same preoccupations and theme. One preoccupation has been about the status of phantasies in the mind of the individual and not simply their content. When are they regarded as facts, probabilities, possibilities or mere fancies? This line of thought culminated in the ideas put forward in Chapter 1, on ‘Belief and psychic reality’. A second line of thinking that converges with the first has been on the internal relationship of subjectivity with objectivity and its origins in the primitive Oedipal triangle. This line of exploration led to the theory developed in Chapter 4, on ‘Subjectivity, objectivity and triangular space’. A third line followed from the recognition that when a phantasy is not taken to be real or given the status of a belief it might be consigned to the Imagination. But what is and where is the Imagination in any modern model of the Mind? Ever since the demise of faculty psychology over a hundred years ago it has been homeless, not even having a proper place in modern philosophy according to Mary Warnock (1976). Nevertheless, as both a mental function and location the Imagination has continued to have a robust existence in literary scholarship and common speech. How can we conceive of it in psychoanalytic terms? This is the third strand which runs through these explorations and it is the explicit focus of attention in Chapter 9, on ‘Daydream, phantasy and fiction’, and Chapter 10, on ‘The other room and poetic space’.

The ideas I put forward about belief and phantasy in relation to reality and imagination pervade all the chapters—sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. The first seven chapters describe various aspects of belief, its vicissitudes and its consequences as I have encountered them in analytic

practice. Chapters 7 and 8 continue this concern but also br