Chapter 1 Belief and Psychic Reality

We call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation.

Since I wrote the papers on which this chapter is based (Britton 1995b, 1997b) several people have pointed out to me that surprisingly little exists in the psychoanalytic literature on the subject of belief. It is surprising because the daily work of psychoanalysts includes the exploration of their patients’ conscious and unconscious beliefs. It is also a continuous task for practising analysts to examine, as best they can, their own. It seems to be the case that not only the exploration of beliefs in daily psychoanalytic practice is taken for granted, but also the role of belief in everyday life. Our moment-to-moment sense of security depends on our belief in the wellbeing of ourselves, our loved ones and our valued objects. Belief rests on probability, not certainty, and yet it produces the emotional state that goes with certainty. The state of mind consequent on losing the security of belief is one in which anyone might find themselves; some unfortunate individuals live constantly in doubt of everyday beliefs. They are often the same people who are afflicted with beliefs of which they cannot rid themselves with the aid of reality. One so afflicted I will describe later in this chapter, who believed she would go blind if she did not see her mother, who in fact was dead.

A belief in a specific impending calamity may be unconscious, so that we are anxious without knowing why. If we have an unconscious belief that someone has betrayed us we hate them without apparent cause; if we believe unconsciously that we have done them an injury we feel guilt towards them for no obvious reason. Psychopathology can, in this way, be a result of the nature of unconscious beliefs and we might describe this as

neurosis. There can also be, I think, disorders of the belief function itself. It is the latter that I will concentrate on mainly in this chapter, but first I need to mak