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 wellbeing 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 bypsychic 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 ofworking 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 ajudgement 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 thesystem Ucs,later called theid,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 isUcs.’(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.