Belief and Imagination

Explorations in Psychoanalysis

Ronald Britton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134649143
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the 2013 Sigourney Award!

Belief and Imagination brings together Ronald Britton's writing on these subjects over the last 15 years, exploring the concepts from a Kleinian perspective. The book covers:

• The status of phantasies in an individuals mind - are they facts or possibilities?
• How the notions of objectivity and subjectivity are interrelated and have their origins in the Oedipal triangle
• How phantasies which are held to be products of the imagination, can be accounted for in psychoanalytic terms.

Britton also examines the relationship between psychic reality and fictional writing, and the ways in which belief, imagination and reality are explored in the works of Wordsworth, Rilke, Milton and Blake.

1
Belief and psychic reality

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

(Freud 1927a: 31)

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 well-being 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 make clear my ideas on the role and place of belief in mental life, and to explain what I mean by psychic reality.

I will itemise the description of the steps in the development and testing of beliefs that I proposed in the two papers mentioned above for the reader to use as a guide to the rest of this chapter:

1. Phantasies are generated and persist unconsciously from infancy onwards.
2. The status of belief is conferred on some pre-existing phantasies, which then have emotional and behavioural consequences which otherwise they do not. Beliefs may be unconscious and yet exert effects.
3. When belief is attached to a phantasy or idea, initially it is treated as a fact. The realisation that it is a belief is a secondary process which depends on viewing the belief from outside the system of the belief itself. This depends on internal objectivity, which in turn depends on the individual finding a third position from which to view his or her subjective belief about the object concerned. This, I think, as I explain in later chapters, depends on the internalisation and tolerance of the early Oedipus situation.
4. Once it is conscious and recognised to be a belief it can be tested against perception, memory, known facts and other existing beliefs.
5. When a belief fails the test of reality it has to be relinquished, in the same sense that an object has to be relinquished when it ceases to exist. As a lost object has to be mourned by the repeated discovery of its disappearance, so a lost belief has to be mourned by the repeated discovery of its invalidity. This, in analysis, constitutes part of working through.
6. The repression of a belief renders the particular belief unconscious but does not abolish some of its effects. Other measures that are taken to deal with threatening beliefs are directed at the belief function itself. Counter-beliefs may usurp the place of disturbing beliefs, creating an alternative to psychic reality, as in mania. The function of belief may be suspended, producing a pervading sense of evenly distributed psychic unreality, as in the ‘as-if’ syndrome; or the apparatus of belief may be destroyed or dismantled, as may be found in some psychotic states.
7. What is perceived requires belief to become knowledge. Disbelief can therefore be used as a defence against either phantasies or perceptions.

Psychic reality

In 1897 Freud wrote: ‘Belief (and doubt) is a phenomenon that belongs wholly to the system of the ego (the Cs. [the conscious]) and has no counterpart in the Ucs. [the unconscious]’ (Freud 1897a: 255–6). He equated belief with ‘a judgement of reality’ (Freud 1895: 333). ‘If after the conclusion of the act of thought the indication of reality reaches the perception, then a judgement of reality, belief has been achieved’ (ibid.: 313). In addition to the physical senses, ‘indications of reality’ could be achieved through speech, but this would apply only to ‘thought reality’, which was different from ‘external reality’ (ibid.: 373). This difference between thought reality and external reality is his first formulation of this crucial distinction: ‘Psychical reality is a particular form of existence not to be confused with material reality’ (Freud 1900b; 620). He did not subsequently describe belief as a process in his writing, leaving it in place in his theoretical account of psychic function as something accomplished by conferring the status of reality on perceptions and thoughts. He was convinced that this function was located in the ‘system of the ego’ (Freud 1897a: 255); he never changed that opinion and was adamant that the system Ucs, later called the id, knew nothing of belief, reality, contradiction, space or time (Freud 1933a: 74). Unlike the id, he thought the ‘Ego has the character of Pcpt.-Cs. [perception]’, which places all its material in space and time (ibid.: 75). Freud returned repeatedly to Kant’s philosophical assertion that space and time are necessary forms of the human mind, claiming that the system unconscious did not conform to the philosopher’s theorem, but that the Ego, because of its roots in the conscious perceptual apparatus, necessarily disposed itself in conformity with that system’s construction of space and time. I suggest that our beliefs necessarily conform to this construction of space/time, as does what we describe as our ‘imagination’, in which we locate some phantasies. I discuss this further in Chapters 9 and 10 (‘Daydream, phantasy and fiction’ and ‘The other room and poetic space’).

When he wrote about belief in 1897, Freud equated the ego with consciousness. By the time he wrote ‘The ego and the id’ he was quite clear that ‘A part of the ego…undoubtedly is Ucs.’ (Freud 1923a: 18) and he regarded mental processes as themselves unconscious (Freud 1915b: 171). I take believing to be such a process, and therefore unconscious, and I think that the resulting beliefs may become conscious, remain unconscious or become unconscious.

Freud, having established the term psychic reality, somewhat confuses the issue by the way he uses it in two senses. He does the same with ‘internal reality’ as he does with ‘external reality’. Following Kant, he regards the thing in itself as unknowable, the noumenon, and the reality experienced, that is, created by perception (Freud 1915b: 171). Sometimes when he refers to reality he means the thing in itself and sometimes he means perceptual reality. In the same way, sometimes he equates psychic reality with an unknowable unconscious system: ‘The unconscious’, he wrote, ‘is the true psychical reality; in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world’ (Freud 1900b; 613). At other times he means psychic reality to be something created by the ‘judgement of reality, belief’ (Freud 1897a: 333). It is in this latter sense that I am using psychic reality— that is, as that which is created by belief—and I regard belief as the function that confers the status of reality on to phantasies and ideas. I suggest that belief is to psychic reality what perception is to material reality. Belief gives the force of reality to that which is psychic, just as perception does to that which is physical. Like perception, belief is an active process, and, like perception, it is influenced by desire, fear and expectation—and, just as perceptions can be denied, so beliefs can be disavowed. Freud thought that in neurosis belief was ‘refused to repressed material’ and displaced ‘on to the defending material’ (ibid.: 255–6). I am modifying this by making use of his later notion of an unconscious ego to suggest that there are repressed beliefs which may produce neurotic symptoms.

Beliefs have consequences: they arouse feelings, influence perceptions and promote actions. Phantasies, conscious or unconscious, which are not the object of belief do not have consequences: disavowal therefore can be used to evade these consequences. Unconscious beliefs have consequences, so we feel and act quite often for no apparent reason, and may find a spurious reason to explain our feelings and actions. Rationalisation is the artefact of a constructed logical justification for a strongly held conviction that is really based on an unconscious belief.

The role and place of belief

I regard the epistemophilic instinct (Wissentrieb) to be on a par with and independent of the other instincts; in other words, I think that the desire for knowledge exists alongside love and hate. Human beings have an urge to love, to hate, to know, and a desire to be loved, a fear of being hated and a wish to be understood. Unlike Freud and Klein, I do not think of Wissentrieb as a component instinct, but as an instinct with components. Exploration, recognition and belief are among such components. They can be thought of as mental counterparts of basic biological functions such as molecular recognition and binding.

We need to believe in order to act and react, and a good deal of the time we have to do so without knowledge. I think that we believe in ideas in a similar way to that in which we ‘cathect’ objects. A belief is a phantasy invested with the qualities of a psychic object and believing is a form of object relating. I think belief, as an act, is in the realm of knowledge what attachment is in the realm of love. The language of belief is clearly cast in the language of a relationship. We embrace beliefs or surrender to them; we hold beliefs and we abandon them; sometimes we feel that we betray them. There are times when we are in the grip of a belief, held captive by it, feel persecuted by it or are possessed by it. We relinquish our most deeply held beliefs, as we relinquish our deepest personal relationships, only through a process of mourning. It is my observation that those people who have difficulty relinquishing objects have difficulty relinquishing beliefs.

Belief and knowledge

To believe something is not the same as to know it. The following philosophical distinction is helpful and relevant, not only in theory, but also in analytic practice. Belief is defined as:

The epistemic attitude of holding a proposition p to be true where there is some degree of evidence, though not conclusive evidence, for the truth of p…while knowing p would generally be considered to entail…that p is true, believing p is consistent with the actual falsity of p.

(Flew 1979: 38)

My purpose in offering a philosophical dictionary definition of the term ‘belief’ is not to enter into a philosophical discussion of the concepts of belief and knowledge, but to provide an acceptable description of the word ‘belief’. In ordinary usage we happily describe someone as believing something even if we are aware that what they believe is not the case. We would not describe them as knowing something if we were aware that what they believed was untrue; in both philosophy and common speech the use of the two words differs. My reason for emphasising this point is that claiming to know something means that one asserts that it is incontrovertibly true, whereas stating that one believes something is saying that one takes it to be true but accepts the possibility that it may not be true. However, our emotional reactions and often also our actions do not wait for knowledge but are based on belief. In other words, we are apt initially to treat believing as knowing and beliefs as facts. We are captives of our beliefs while we regard them as knowledge, never more so than when they are unconscious; the realisation that they are only beliefs is an act of emancipation. I think that such psychic emancipation is a function of psychoanalysis. Only through psychic development do we recognise that we actively believe something and that we are not simply in the presence of facts. This recognition is a first stage in the relinquishment of a redundant belief as it admits the possibility of doubt. Cognitive, scientific and cultural development is not simply the acquisition of new ideas but an act of emancipation from preexisting beliefs. I suggest that this involves the bringing together of subjective experience with objective self-awareness so that one sees oneself in the act of believing something. This depends on internal triangulation, and that in turn requires the toleration of an internal version of the Oedipal situation. I suggest that the recognition that one has a belief rather than that one is in possession of a fact requires what I describe as triangular psychic space—a third position in mental space is needed from which the subjective self can be observed having a relationship with an idea. The basis of triangular space and the origin of the third position in the primitive Oedipus situation—and the relation of that to subjectivity and objectivity—are the subject of Chapter 4 (‘Subjectivity, objectivity and triangular space’).

In the model I am proposing subjective belief comes first before objective evaluation or reality testing. Objective evaluation may use external perception, in reality testing, or it may simply involve correlation internally with known facts or related beliefs. The internal objective evaluation of a subjective belief is particularly crucial in situations where direct perceptual confirmation is not possible. It depends on two processes, both of which provoke resistance. One is the correlation of subjective and objective points of view, and the other is the relinquishment of an existing belief. The former involves the Oedipal triangle and the latter mourning.

Just as beliefs require sensory confirmation (reality testing) in order to become knowledge, so what is perceived requires belief to be regarded as knowledge. Seeing is not necessarily believing. Disbelief can be used, therefore, as a defence against both phantasies and perceptions, and it plays a familiar role in neurosis and everyday life, where it is usually called denial. It can also be a manifestation of aversion towards otherness. If any cognitive tie outside the existing belief system of the self is treated as a dangerous link to something alien, then all such mental links may be destroyed, as Bion described in his paper ‘Attacks on linking’ (1959). This may eliminate the capacity for belief in anything.

A state in which belief is treated as knowledge is usually described as omniscience, and the resultant beliefs as delusions. However, initially in my scheme of mental events beliefs are taken to be facts, and I would not describe this as delusional, but as naive, just as I would not call infantile mentation psychotic just because adults who use it are psychotic. It would be more useful to describe delusion belief which is treated axiomatically as knowledge even though it runs counter to perceived reality. My starting point in this business of considering belief was, like Descartes’s, the realisation that I had held in the course of my life, without question, fallacious beliefs. Descartes wrote in his First Meditation: ‘Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them’ (quoted in Ayer and O’Grady 1992: 111).

For me, the dou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Belief and psychic reality
• 2 Naming and containing
• 3 Oedipus in the depressive position
• 4 Subjectivity, objectivity and triangular space
• 5 The suspension of belief and the ‘as-if’ syndrome
• 6 Before and after the depressive position Ps(n)→D(n)→Ps(n+1)
• 7 Complacency in analysis and everyday life
• 8 The analyst’s intuition: selected fact or overvalued idea?
• 9 Daydream, phantasy and fiction
• 10 The other room and poetic space
• 11 Wordsworth: the loss of presence and the presence of loss
• 12 Existential anxiety: Rilke’s Duino Elegies
• 13 Milton’s destructive narcissist or Blake’s true self?
• 14 William Blake and epistemic narcissism
• 15 Publication anxiety
• References