Ron Britton

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Ronald Britton or Ron Britton (born 1932) is a Distinguished Fellow. of the British Psychoanalytical Society and Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Influenced by the work of Melanie Klein , his contributions to psychoanalytic theory include: the concept of ‘triangular space’, theories about belief and imagination, the superego, hysteria, and narcissistic disorders, and, more recently, work on models of the mind and the relationship of psychoanalysis to neuroscience.

Early life and education

Britton was born in 1932 in Lancaster and as a child spent much time in Grasmere in the Lake District where he first became interested in the poetry of Wordsworth. After primary school he gained a scholarship to Lancaster Royal Grammar School, before moving to University College London to study medicine. He qualified at the age of twenty-three and was soon drafted into the Army under National Service. He was a Regimental Medical Officer to a Royal Tank Regiment in Germany in 1957.

Britton chose to specialise in Psychiatry, and began by studying Neurology at the Queen Square Neurology Hospital and after various placements he ultimately worked in the Child Psychiatry department of the Maudsley Hospital in south London. This early psychiatric understanding underpinned his later approach to psychoanalysis.

In 1970 he moved to the Tavistock Clinic, where he trained in both Adult and Child Psychotherapy and then began his training at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London. He qualified as a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS) in 1979.

As a child psychiatrist, Ron Britton was chair of the Department for Children and Parents at the Tavistock, until he left the NHS in 1984 . He participated in running a project offering psychoanalytic psychotherapy to severely deprived children in social care, and in the establishment of a service for parents of infants who had anxieties in their new role . At this time, Britton came to understand early childhood as a crucial phase in our mental development.

Among the psychoanalytic teachers and colleagues who have influenced his psychoanalytic approach are Hanna Segal, Herbert Rosenfeld, Betty Joseph and Wilfred Bion. His closest colleagues have been John Steiner and Michael Feldman. Britton also draws on his wider interests in his psychoanalytic thinking: science, philosophy, theology and poetry.

Career

Ron Britton has been a training and supervising analyst in the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS) since 1985, and was President of the Society between 2000 and 2004. He was a Vice-President of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in the same period .

He has received a number of awards over his career, including the IPA’s Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement in 2013 , and the Sigourney Award (USA) for Outstanding Contributions to Psychoanalysis in the same year . He was made Honorary Doctor of Literature by the University of East London in 2005, and is an honorary member of the British Psychoanalytic Association , the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies California, and IPTAR (Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research) New York.

He has written and co-written numerous papers and articles, and published three books: Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis (1998), Sex, Death and the Superego: Experiences in Psychoanalysis (2003), and Between Mind and Brain: Models of the Mind and Models in the Mind (2015). Recently, a second revised edition of Sex, Death and the Superego was published by Routledge, with the new subtitle: Updating Psychoanalysis in the Age of Neuroscience. He contributed his paper, “The Missing Link” as a chapter in The Oedipus Complex Today (1989) edited by his colleague John Steiner.

Since 2003, Britton has, with fellow analysts John Steiner and Michael Feldman, organised the annual international West Lodge Conference, which focuses on clinical practice. Over the past two decades, he has taught and led seminars around the world. In the 1990s, he led postgraduate seminars in Frankfurt and, between 2002-2008, in New York . He has also run seminars in Athens, Sydney and Vienna . In collaboration with Steiner and Feldman, he ran a postgraduate clinical seminar for Russian analysts in London . He has lectured in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France, Poland, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Japan, and various cities across the United States .

Key ideas

Belief and triangular space

One of Ron Britton’s key concepts is that of ‘triangular space’. Taking Klein’s version of the Oedipus situation in infancy as beginning with the primal scene (a view or phantasy of the parent’s sexual relationship) he saw the move from a dyadic (one-to-one) relationship to a triangular relationship as a crucial developmental step. This means that the child can conceive of an object relationship in which he/she is not a participant but an observer. This provides a third position within a triangular space, which is then internalised. This enables the individual to observe him/herself whilst being him/herself in interaction with another; in other words, to reconcile subjectivity with objectivity. Britton first described this in the analysis of borderline patients, where there was a lack of a third position and triangular space.

In his first book, 'Belief and Imagination' (1998) Ron Britton develops his ideas about truth and psychic reality in relation to triangular space. His work has long been concerned with belief and, in his most recent book, Between Mind and Brain (2015) he states that, "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" . As described by his colleague, psychoanalyst David Simpson, Britton argues that, “…it is belief that confers the status of reality on phantasies and ideas, which are then treated as facts. He considers belief to be a component of the epistemophilic [knowledge-seeking] instinct essential for life in the face of uncertainty. Beliefs are phantasies which are engaged with as psychic objects and – being emotionally invested – they require mourning if they are to be relinquished.”

Britton’s work has often explored the ways in which we try to evade knowledge or recognition of the early Oedipal situation. He has written extensively about the internal Oedipal triangle – formed of the child and his or her parents – in relation to psychological development. In his paper 'The Missing Link' (1989), he wrote about patients for whom perceiving or imagining a connection between their parents filled them with dread. For these patients an internal object relationship, in which they assumed the position of an observer, was not possible. This leaves the individual with either an inability to tolerate objectivity, or an inability to tolerate subjectivity.

Psychic atopia

Influenced in part by his medical understanding of the body’s defences against invasion and infection, Britton’s concept of ‘psychic atopia’ applies to both clinical work with patients, and to phenomena in the social and political realm. He describes the term as denoting, ‘hypersensitivity to psychic difference, an allergy to the products of other minds’.
Psychic atopia describes an antipathy to otherness and other people’s minds, shared to some extent by all of us, but varying considerably in degree from individual to individual. In Britton’s view, it is the ‘psychic counterpart to the tolerance and intolerance of the somatic immune system’, as it attempts to defend the mind from potentially harmful “foreign bodies”.

David Simpson outlines how Britton links psychic atopia links to a failure of maternal containment:

“…the good maternal object is preserved by projecting the experience of misunderstanding into a third object who personifies malignant misunderstanding. Like Bion, he [Britton] implicates an innate factor alongside maternal failure, called ‘psychic atopia’: a hypersensitivity to psychic differences.”

Britton’s suggestion is that an anti-object relationship – a xenophobic component – is to some extent present in all of us, and this is his version of what has been called the death instinct.

Religious belief and the superego

For Britton, the ego is the source of morality in that it discriminates between good and bad, love and hate, and seeks to repair its objects. The feelings evoked at the more mature end of the depressive position – concern, regret, remorse, and the kind of guilt that is linked to reparative wishes and efforts – he sees as issuing from the ego. The superego is the source of persecutory feelings of guilt and other terrors. In practice it may be difficult to feel just one or the other: guilt from the ego or persecution from the superego. At the same time, as a person matures, the ego needs to emancipate itself from the harsh superego and exercise judgement. Britton has linked his insights on the superego to various spheres, many related to clinical narcissism, but also including an exploration of religion.

In his view, when all goes well enough in infancy and childhood, cycles of projection and introjection enable us to take in loving figures, which he suggests we experience as constituting our good ‘soul’. Despite archaic monsters remaining in the superego, we also have benign figures to protect us. He observes that both types of internal figure have been externalised in religious stories and beliefs, so that we have access to many centuries of study of the superego through theological writings. He remarks that: ‘The language of theology is the natural, or supernatural, language of the superego’ .

He goes on to assert that religious faith, as a form of belief, attaches itself to many things ostensibly unrelated to religion. He writes: “Discovering hidden areas of supernatural belief in the secular lives of non-theistic patients is one of the pleasures of practising psychoanalysis. And exposing the unconscious and archaic areas of belief that silently govern our lives is one of the most liberating effects of analysis.”

Literature and poetry

Out of his work on the Oedipal situation came Britton’s paper on aesthetics, ‘Daydream, phantasy and fiction’ . Here he distinguishes “serious fiction” from “escapist romance”; the latter he connects with other forms of psychic refuge. He sees these two types of literature as being either “truth-seeking” or “truth-evading”: i.e. does the writer attempt to uncover unconscious beliefs or to look away from them? The internal Oedipal triangle is also where Britton locates the imagination. He views the imagination as a mental space that either evades or seeks truth; where the underlying phantasy can be wish-fulfilling or reality-seeking.

He has written that, “poetry… is a source of understanding and a departure point for psychological exploration” . He has turned repeatedly to particular writers in his accounts of clinical cases and elucidations of theory: Shakespeare, Rilke, Wordsworth and Blake. He writes in Belief and Imagination:

“These incursions into poetry, philosophy and theology have not occurred simply because of personal interest; they have happened, I think, because psychoanalysis necessarily finds itself exploring the areas of mental life that have been the concern of philosophers, theologians and poets. As Bion wrote, ‘The psycho-analyst’s experience of philosophical issues is so real that he often has a clearer grasp of the necessity for a philosophical background than the professional philosopher’ (Bion 1967: 152).”

He finds in religious and poetic works opportunities to explore the role and function of the superego. He engaged with texts such as 'Milton’s Paradise Lost' and the Biblical story of Job, in Belief and Imagination and Sex, Death and the Superego

Models of the mind and neuroscience

In his 2015 book, 'Between Mind and Brain: Models of the Mind and Models in the Mind', Britton explores the ways in which we use models to think about mental life. He writes more about the mind than the brain, though recent developments in neuroscience also feature.

In his review of Britton’s book for the British Medical Journal, Dr Neil Vickers writes:

“Fantasies, conscious and unconscious, are models in Britton’s sense. But so too are theoretical constructs such as the Oedipus complex, the ‘depressive position’, or ‘basic assumptions’. Many people imagine that psychoanalysts apply these models dogmatically to their patients… Britton takes this case apart at some length. The psychoanalyst, in his view, should aim as far as possible to set aside all models, especially those to which he is most attached. They will only distort what he sees. To understand another person, you have to tolerate not understanding him or her for a long time.”

Works

Books

• 1998 Britton, R. Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis. Routledge.

• 2003 Britton, R. Sex, Death, and the Superego: Experiences in Psychoanalysis. Karnac.

• 2020 Britton, R. Sex, Death, and the Superego: Updating Psychoanalytic Experience and Developments in Neuroscience.

• 2015 Britton, R. Between Mind and Brain: Models of the Mind and Models in the Mind. Karnac.

Articles and papers

• 1981, Segal, H. Britton, R. Interpretation and Primitive Psychic Processes: A Kleinian View. Psychoanal. Inq., 1(2):267-277.

• 1986, Britton, R. The Infant in the Adult. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 2(1):31-44.

• 1989 Britton, R. ‘The Missing Link: Parental Sexuality in the Oedipus Complex’, J. Steiner (ed.) The Oedipus Complex Today: Clinical Implications. Karnac.

• 1992, Britton, R. Keeping Things in Mind. New Library of Psychoanalysis, 14:102-113.

• 1992 Britton, R. ‘The Oedipus Situation and the Depressive Position’, R. Anderson (ed.) Clinical Lectures on Klein and Bion. Routledge.

• 1994, Britton, R. ‘The Blindness of the Seeing Eye: Inverse Symmetry as a Defense Against Reality’. Psychoanal. Inq., 14(3):365-378.

• 1994, Britton, R. Steiner, J. Interpretation: Selected Fact or Overvalued Idea? International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 75:1069-1078.

• 1994, Britton, R. Publication Anxiety: Conflict Between Communication and Affiliation. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 75:1213-1224.

• 1995, Britton, R. Psychic Reality and Unconscious Belief. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 76:19-23.

• 1999, Britton, R. Getting in on the Act: The Hysterical Solution. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 80(1):1-14.

• 2000, Britton, R. Hyper-Subjectivity and Hyper-Objectivity in Narcissistic Disorders. Fort Da, 6(2):53-64.

• 2003, Britton, R. Common and Uncommon Ground: Panelist's Response. Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association, 51(4):1335-1337.

• 2004, Britton, R. Subjectivity, Objectivity, and Triangular Space. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73(1):47-61.

• 2005, Britton, R. Quinodoz, J. Sex, Death, and the Superego: Experiences in Psychoanalysis. L'Année Psychanalytique Int., 2005:131-135.

• 2010 Britton, R. Feldman, N. Stein, R. Tucker, S. Roundtable Discussion 2, March 31, 2007. Psychoanal. Rev., 97(2):303-335.

• 2010 Britton, R. ‘Developmental Uncertainty versus Paranoid Regression’. The Psychoanalytic Review, 97(2):195-206.

• 2015 Britton, R. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: What Made the Monster Monstrous? J. Anal. Psychol., 60(1):1-11.

External links

• Institute of Psychoanalysis Authors page
• British Medical Journal review of Between Mind and Brain
• Karnac Books: Ronald Britton
• International Psychoanalytic Association website
• PEP-Web Ronald Britton's publications

Media

• Melanie Klein Trust website writers page
• Melanie Klein Trust website videos page
• Ron Britton on the work of Karl Abraham
• IoPA 'Encounters Through Generations' video

See Also

Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, Herbert Rosenfeld, Hanna Segal, John Steiner, Michael Feldman, Edna O'Shaughnessy

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