Methodism and psychoanalysis—together at last! And, with a born-again Methodist guiding the affairs of the United States, it's about time

In this intriguing book, Keith Haartman offers us a psychoanalytic interpretation of the only religious movement in English history that ever managed to become something like a mass movement. On the cover is a picture of John Wesley preaching while standing on the grave of his father,1 which seems to foreshadow the text to follow. It turns out, however, to be refreshingly free of finding oedipal symptoms everywhere. Haartman's approach is sensitive to the nuances of the lives and thoughts he is analyzing, and makes an heroic though perhaps not totally successful effort not to pathologize religious experience.

His argument is set forth in the first three chapters, especially the third; the remaining six enrich it. The personalities of Methodist believers, he says, were wounded by the demographic regimes and