Patrick Casement, Credo? Religion and Psychoanalysis. London:  Aeon Books Ltd. 2020.

We all struggle with the need for certainty, through out our careers, especially those of us who work and are exposed to the life and death anxieties in the people we see. These experiences, and the search for answers, can sometimes be countered with a certainty as a means of relieving the pain. Religion often offers solace in the form of certainties and reassurances. In comparison the emphasis in psychoanalysis, in the face of these fears, is the strengthening of the internal world through the introjection and repair of good objects, lost or found. The exploration of these issues around the joys and anguish of existence with another can in the end be a source of abiding inner strength, an inner strength without false certainties. In these situations even suffering and despair themselves can be of the greatest value, because it brings with it the capacity to discover what one shares with others, including the analyst. Casement has spent many years at this craft and this book is the result of this life long engagement.

As Kierkegaard has stated

“It sometimes happens that despair itself provides the very condition of urgency that brings someone to ask those serious, tragic, questions about life and meaning.”

Many people seen in the consulting room have lost their faith, in humanity, or God, or feel let down in other ways by life, and turn to a psychoanalysis that does not seem to offer ‘pie in the sky’ relief, to the tricky questions of mortality, and why bad things happen to good people, when the bad or evil, seem to flourish.

Casement illustrates how he himself went through this process of disillusionment with religion, he originally trained for the priesthood and like many of us became disillusioned by the hypocrisy that certain experiences within this clerical world confronted him with. In this case th