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In this slender volume, Neville Symington, who died in 2019 at age eighty-two, surveys the main psychoanalytic viewpoints he has espoused over the course of his career. In an earlier book, A Different Path: An Emotional Autobiography (2018), Symington writes, “It has always been extremely important to me to be taught by someone who knows the subject ‘from the inside,’ who has personally assimilated it, for whom the subject has come as an answer to questions which are of personal significance” (p. 120). One senses that the psychoanalytic themes he explores in The Growth of Mind are ones he knows “from the inside” and have developed out of his personal life struggles, some of which he describes briefly.
Symington was an ordained Catholic priest before rejecting the priesthood and becoming a psychoanalyst. In this book, he recounts how at age twenty-one, during his first year at seminary, he experienced a profound sense of relief, as if he had “arrived home,” when he attended a lecture on ontology by a professor who was “talking from his own soul”: “I was as gripped by his every word just as much as the addict is magnetized to his drug. At the end of that year a foundation had been laid in my heart and mind which has never left me” (p. 85).
Despite rejecting the priesthood, Symington preserves what he found meaningful in his religious education and carries this over into his psychoanalytic approach—a sense of awe at the wonder of Being and the mystery at the heart of existence. In this book, Symington quotes liberally from theologians, as well as from philosophers ranging from Spinoza to Wittgenstein. He is an intuitive thinker, and the strengths and weaknesses of his approach follow from this. The psychoanalytic themes he presents are not developed systematically but reappear as leitmotifs throughout the text.