Uncertain Facts and Certain Fictions

Autorentext

Ronald Britton (1932-2025) was a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and a distinguished Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. His work is read extensively internationally, and he received a number of awards for excellence. He was the editor of Psychoanalytic Approaches to Forgiveness and Mental Health (2023) and The Oedipus Complex Today: Clinical Implications (1989). He was the author of Sex, Death, and the Superego: Updating Psychoanalytic Experience and Developments in Neuroscience (2020), Between Mind and Brain: Models of the Mind and Models in the Mind (2015) and Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis (1998).

Susan Lawrence is a training and supervising analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society in full time private practice in London. She teaches in the UK and internationally and is a trustee of the Melanie Klein Trust.

Klappentext

Uncertain Facts and Certain Fictions: Psychic Reality in literature and Psychoanalysis is a collection of Ronald Britton's papers, written over his distinguished career. Each paper demonstrates his insight and ability to articulate profound links between psychoanalysis and writings from literary, religious, philosophical or scientific spheres.

Human beings think in metaphors and analogies, so literary metaphors often come to mind to both psychoanalysts and their patients. Britton recognised that both analysis and literature share the same fundamental wish to explore our experience and feelings. He saw writers as expressing our "models of belief," which-along with phantasies, memories, dreams and the imagination-form the stuff of human psychic reality and its persistent distortions. In Uncertain Facts and Certain Fictions, he draws on a broad array of texts, from the Old Testament and Enlightenment philosophers to Romantic poets and novelists, each containing insights that prefigure psychoanalytic discoveries. Deftly weaving clinical material throughout, he demonstrates the timeless interconnection between these works and psychoanalytic ideas.

Whether you are a general reader looking to deepen your psychological insight, or a clinician wanting to broaden your professional frame of reference, this book will profoundly reinvigorate your understanding of these complementary disciplines.

Inhalt

PART 1 Introduction Britton's early work on psychic reality and belief Ronald Britton's biography and connection to literature Prologue PART 2 1. Daydreams, Phantasy and Fiction 2. Wordsworth: the Loss of Presence and the Presence of Loss 3. The other Room and Poetic Space 4. Hysteria (II): Sabina Spielrein, Sex, Death and Psychoanalysis 5. Emancipation from the Superego 6. He Thinks Himself Impaired: the Pathologically Envious Personality 7. There is No End of the Line: Terminating the Interminable 8. The Preacher, the Poet and the Psychoanalyst 9. Marry Shelley's Frankenstein: What Made the Monster Monstrous? 10. Religious Fanaticism and Ideological Genocide 11. The Mountains of Primal Grief 12. Reflections on The Confessions of St Augustine 13. The Unforgiving Self 14. Revenge or Forgiveness: The Oresteia PART 3 'The Grammar of Object Relations' Britton's Further Work on Belief in Psychic Development The Letters of Epicurus