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This is one of the latest in the New Library of Psychoanalysis, edited by Elizabeth Spillius. It is a deep and complex book, many-layered and difficult to summarise.
Entitled Belief and Imagination, the book's sub-title I think more aptly encompasses the range of the work. It is at once hugely broad: a treatise on human nature. At the same time, it is a carefully focused book about the Oedipus complex. Ronald Britton locates himself as a British post-Kleinian. It is perhaps this re-emphasis on the centrality of the Oedipus situation in all fields of human endeavour, founded on a more-or-less securely established loving relationship with a primary maternal object, signified by Bion's notion of containment, which marks out this increasingly distinctive school of thought.
Although the product of fifteen years’ work and bringing together a number of previously published papers, the book is a pleasingly integrated work.
For Britton, the ‘epistemophilic impulse’, the wish to know and be known, is not a component of love and hate, but rather a drive in itself, but mingled with and complicated by the other two. The depressive position, as outlined by Klein and the Oedipus situation are, for Britton
..inextricably intertwined in such a way that one cannot be resolved without the other; we resolve the Oedipus complex by working through the depressive position and the depressive position by working through the Oedipus complex.
Throughout the book, Britton examines the different ways in which belief masquerades as knowledge, always acknowledging the difficulty of giving up our beliefs and the work of mourning which is required to do so. But what is imagination? Where, psychically, is it located? This question resonates throughout the chapters. He presents his ideas on the fundamental importance of finding triangular space, the space which is encompassed by the parents’ relationship to each other and to their children. Here we are on the trail of the imagination.
Chapters 1-8 are esse