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This book represents the author's attempt to combine in a single volume several subjects, each of which merits close consideration, but whose bearing on one another varies between the intimate and the hypothetical. Marie T. Hoffman, a graduate of the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis of New York University, has undertaken a study in which the quite fascinating history of a psychoanalytic psychotherapy is interrupted by long intervals of psychoanalytic theory and history, theology, metaphysics, biography, neuroscience. The history serves as a model to illustrate points drawn from literally hundreds of quotations extracted for the purpose from as many authorities, as well as to demonstrate Dr. Hoffman's therapeutic method and her personal experience of the treatment.
Psychoanalytic studies from an explicitly Christian perspective have been unusual. Freud's aggressive atheism, taken together with his criticism of traditional sexual morality, set the stage for defensive operations on the part of religious minds. In long retrospect, the polemic carried on over psychoanalysis looks embarrassingly superficial. I recall a conversation in the 1940s with a young Catholic clinical psychologist who shyly informed me that he had just been granted clerical dispensation to read Freud's own writings, not only works about him that bore the imprimatur. Expurgation on the psychoanalytic side has mainly taken the form of ignoring the relevance of religion to the conduct of life, except as a repressive force, or, in a liberal concession, as sublimation faute de mieux. One of the merits of this very mixed bag of a book is the author's tracing of a continuous trend outside the mainline of psychoanalysis that has been not only sympathetic to Judaism and Christianity, but in a measure inspired and theoretically influenced by them.
To take hold of Dr. Hoffman's diffuse argument it might be best to start by reading the final chapter, which summarizes the converging theore