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The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence, and History(Strozier et al., 2010) is an interdisciplinary book that has extraordinary relevance in today's world. While the central theory that unites the essays in the volume is derived from self psychology, the significance to the clinician is not, or at least not only, to be found in its psychoanalytic perspective, but even more, in its conveyance to the reader both the historical and the contextual importance of the fundamentalist mindset from past to present, illuminating as it does the Nazi movement, the French Revolution, the Jihadists, and the Hindutva movement in India. The book in its entirety offers an intriguing discussion of a subject that is certainly current, compelling, and well worth our time and attention. It is intelligently written, containing essays that introduce the topic and educate the reader from a variety of perspectives, including historic, psychological, secular, and religious concerns. In short, it represents quite an attainment that, despite the inherent complications of the subject matter, the essays are uniformly presented in clear, understandable prose. I am personally grateful to the editors for making this fascinating but complex set of contemporary issues available for the readers’ more or less easy comprehension. And, for the psychoanalytic reader, the self psychological understanding of the origins of the fundamentalist mindset creates a sense that we can understand as never before why the established set of attitudes that comprise
fundamentalism has swept the world in the past and continues to do so in the present. The authors offer us a way to comprehend empathically why such an unlikely orientation and approach endures and expands.
The book (Strozier et al., 2010), is divided into four parts, in addition to a foreword written by Martin Marty and an introduction written by Charles Strozier and David Terman. It was Martin Marty who had led the Fund