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In a Foreword, the author says that this book is a continuation of thoughts expressed in his Man for Himself and is not representative of the views of those psycho-analysts who are either practising religionists or anti-religious. It is, 'at most, representative of the thinking of a third group of psycho-analysts'. A note at the end says that the book is based on a series of lectures given on the Dwight Harrington Terry Foundation, an American institution somewhat resembling the British Gifford Lectures, for the provision of 'Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy'. But this book is by no means academic in character. Fromm is an excellent popular writer, and this is a very clear and fluent exposition of the nature of religion and its relation to psycho-analysis as the author apprehends it. He is convinced that 'the problem of religion is not the problem of God but the problem of man; religious formulations and religious symbols are attempts to give expression to certain kinds of human experience'. Holding it to be impossible to make valid statements about a positive God but only about negative idols, he asks 'Is it not time to cease to argue about God and instead to unite in the unmasking of contemporary forms of idolatry?'