Uncertain Facts and Certain Fiction

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.

‘This collection of papers by one of Britain’s most respected psychoanalysts displays the originality of his ideas as he brings literature and clinical thinking to bear on important issues in contemporary thought. For example, the critical difference between great literature that brings us into contact with reality and escapist romance that evades it, is revealed in works as diverse as those of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Milton, Rilke, Epicurus, Trollope, St Augustine, and Mary Shelley, all of them making connections with the unconscious processes observed by psychoanalysts.Topics such as forgiveness and emancipation mix with ideas from the Bible and quantum mechanics to reveal connections that turn out to raise fundamental issues of how the mind works and how its laws are subject to those of the brain. A highly entertaining work not to be missed by psychoanalysts, and yet comprehensible and stimulating to the general reader.’John Steiner, Training analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society, author of Psychic Retreats (1993) and Seeing and Being Seen (2011).'Ronald Britton is one of the most original and creative psychoanalytic thinkers of his generation. With clarity and imaginative depth, he helps us navigate the shifting boundaries between inner and outer worlds, fact and fantasy, fiction and psychic reality. This volume captures his distinctive voice and the rare gift he has given many of us: to think. A timely tour de force that opens eyes and ears to the inside and outside—and teaches us how to tell the di[erence.’Professor Peter Fonagy, Professor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Developmental Science, Head of Division for Psychology and Language Sciences, UCL, Senior National Clinical Adviser for NHS England on Children and Young Peoples’ Mental Health.

• Introduction Part 1 Introduction Part 2: Ronald Britton’s Work on Psychic Reality Ronald Britton’s biography and connection to literature Prologue PART 1 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 2 ‘The Grammar of Object Relations’ Britton’s Further Work on Belief in Psychic Development The Letters of Epicurus