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Divine therapy: love, mysticism and psychoanalysis by Janet Sayers Publisher: Oxford University Press; 2003 ISBN 0 19850981 2, PB. Price: £24.95
The relationships between psychoanalysis, religion, mysticism and love have been debated throughout the history of the psychoanalytic movement. Sometimes this has been in relation to characteristics of the movement itself, for example its priestly hierarchy, untestable core beliefs, and attitude that only those who have been transformed (that is, converted by participation in its own rituals) can understand its truths. In other places, it is the ideas of psychoanalysis that have been taken up in religious or mystical terms: its first propagandists in England, for example, were members of the Society for Psychical Research; Freud was forced by the ministrations of some of his friends to engage head-on with (and against) religious experiences and doctrines in some of his writings; the Jungians and post-Jungians have indulged spectacularly in spiritualist imaginings; and, along the way, some profound theological work in Judaism and Christianity has drawn on psychoanalytic insights. Sometimes, it is the practices of psychoanalysis that have been construed in religious terms. As Janet Sayers notes, spreading her net rather more broadly than psychoanalysis itself, "like religion, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy seek to animate or reanimate the psyche or soul of their recipients through the medium of the psychoanalyst's or psychotherapist's oneness with her or his patients. This...