God on the Couch: A Review of Soul on the Couch: Spirituality, Religion, and Morality in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, edited by Charles Spezzano and Gerald J. Gargiulo.: Hillsdale, NJ:  The Analytic Press, 1997. xiv + 241 pp.

I always find books of this kind difficult to review, because they contain much with which I am in sympathy or agreement and much that jars my sensibilities and outlook. This volume offers us a spate of quite disparate essays on aspects of religious, moral, and spiritual experience. I found the title somewhat misleading. The theoretical orientation throughout is self-psychological and pervasively relational, so that the field designated as “contemporary psychoanalysis” is restricted to self psychology and related attempts to translate the whole of the analytic canon into relational terms. Analysts of other persuasions might find themselves adrift in this redefinition of psychoanalysis.

Gargiulo opens with a salvo against the concept of the autonomous self, particularly aiming at its classic elevation at the hands of ego psychology into a therapeutic ideal. Here Ferenczi, whose understanding of relational need and interdependence is preferred to the misguided Freudian metapsychology of independent and isolated autonomous splendor, comes into his own. On these terms, the self, the traditional “I,” is found to be no more than an illusion. Not much of an analytically conceived inner life escapes whipping; even the unconscious is denied existence, because it is created and revealed in and through interpretation. The