Faith, Theology, and Psychoanalysis: The Life and Thought of Harry S. Guntrip by Trevor M. Dobbs  Pickwick Publications, Eugene, OR, 2007;  190 pp; $22.00 Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st Century: Competitors or Collaborators? by David M. Black Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st Century: Competitors or Collaborators?  Routledge, London and New York, 2006;  278 pp; €55.00 hardback, €21.99 paperback

These two books consider the possibilities for both the psychoanalytic understanding of religion and the religious understanding of psychoanalysis. The challenge of

this endeavour is quite apparent when one thinks of the range and variety of both phenomena. Will the psychoanalysis be Freudian, Adlerian, Jungian, Lacanian, object relations, and so forth — or some eclectic mixture? Which of the world's many religions will be discussed? And which of the varieties of religious experience, practice, and doctrine will be examined — from salvation and conversion, to good works and compassion, to soteriology and eschatology? Anyone who writes on the relation between psychoanalysis and religion must inevitably select a few favoured phenomena from each; only by some such neglective or abstractive methodology can an argument get under way.

Trevor M. Dobbs in Faith, Theology and Psychoanalysis prefers the object relations tradition, and focuses upon the impact of D.W Winnicott and W.R.D. Fairbairn on Harry Guntrip's life and work. According to Dobbs, Fairbairn provided Guntrip with the intellectual tools of object relations thought, while the personable Winnicott provided a therapy more in tune with the spirit of the theory. The theological element in Dobbs's argument is furnished by the work of Guntrip's mentor while at London University, the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray (1891-1976), who “constructed an object relations theory within moral philosophy” that “prepared Guntrip to adopt Fairbairn as the psychoanalytic theorist who most appealed to him” (p. 168). Dobbs's references to Macmurray's demythologized Christianity usefully clarify the underlying aims and ambitions of Guntrip's object relations psychoanalysis. Indeed, Guntrip himself commented that he saw “Macmurray's definition of the sphere of religion as the sphere of human relationships” as identical to Fairbairn's “fundamental concern with ‘object relationships’ as the substance of human living” (Guntrip, 1961