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In this book, Ronald Britton addresses several issues at the heart of the psychoanalytic enterprise. He asks: what are the hidden, unconscious models that, treated as facts, determine the form and understanding of our experience, and how do we achieve optimal self-observation with which to recognize these models as beliefs rather than facts, and thus to include them as objects rather than determinants of the psychoanalytic process?
Specifically, Britton addresses how the theoretical models of the mind that psychoanalysts cling to, promote, and apply are not facts, but constructions influenced by fantasy and the social need to give meaning to and control of reality. He identifies what he calls mental models, which structure our thinking and disguise our subjective reactions as facts. He asks how the analyst can achieve the necessary skepticism and objectivity so necessary to the psychoanalytic process, when we seem to hold so tenaciously and with such allegiance to what are actually mere beliefs.
Britton, a past president of the British Psychoanalytical Association and the author of several collections of essays, is an object relations clinician and theorist, but his thesis applies to every model and school of psychoanalysis. He begins with a discussion of natural belief systems that underlie our daily experience and guide us in our relationships and activities. For all practical purposes, according to Britton, life would be unmanageable if we constantly doubted these models.
He compares these natural beliefs to the findings of scientific inquiry and, specifically, to recent claims regarding the operation of the brain and the neurological underpinnings of thought. He argues convincingly that no matter how “true” these scientific and mathematical “discoveries” might be, they are on another order of organization from the natural beliefs