Winner of the 2013 Sigourney Award!

Brings together Ronald Britton's writing on the subject of belief and imagination over the last 15 years, exploring the concepts from a Kleinian perspective and examining the relationship between psychic reality and fictional writing.

Ronald Britton is a psychoanalyst in private practice in London, and a training and supervising analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Association.

Acknowledgements. Introduction. Belief and Psychic Reality. Naming and Containing. Oedipus in the Depressive Position. Subjectivity, Objectivity and Triangular Space. The Suspension of Belief and the 'As-if' Syndrome. Before and After the Depressive Position. Complacency in Analysis and Everyday Life. The Analust's Intuition: Selected Fact or Overvalued Idea? Daydream, Phantasy and Fiction. The Other Room and Poetic Space. Wordsworth: The Loss of Presence and the Presence of Loss. Existential Anxiety: Rilke's Duino Elegies. Milton's Destructive Narcissist or Blake's True Self? William Blake and Epistemic Narcissism. Publication Anxiety. References. Index.