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In this slim volume Jacobs undertakes a comparatively large task, the elaboration of a psychodynamic interpretation of thinking and belief. In his opening chapter he states:
This book is about belief, but it is not confined to religion. It is about the way people believe … It is also about knowledge … about the way people know, or think they know, or even believe they know. (p. 1)
It is a book which has grown and developed from its first presentation in 1987, through a second version in 1993 to this most recent incarnation. This progress perhaps reflects Jabobs's own journey from the theological paradigm to the psychoanalytic and in some ways it represents a work of repair and redemption as much of the psychoanalytic viewpoint as of the religious perspective.
Jacobs takes Freud's concept of religion as an illusion and expands it to include all thinking, knowing and believing. In doing this he builds on Winnicott's thinking on illusion (Winnicott 1975, p. 239): ‘The mother's adaptation to the infant's needs, when good enough, gives the infant the illusion that there is an external reality that corresponds to the infant's own capacity to create.’ The work of Winnicott and Bion inform Jacobs's fundamental view of illusion as being of crucial significance in development, in culture and religion, and in the psychodynamics of knowing and believing. Much of the opening chapter, ‘Illusions of knowledge and belief’, is spent in constructing the argument that illusion is a necessary and purposeful element in ordinary human experience, right from infancy and into adult life. Jacobs is careful to point out that he is not concerned with the content of illusion, whether it be right or wrong, so much as with its purpose in normal psychological functioning. He sees his use of the term illusion as referring to ‘the use of objects,