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Fr. Victor White's last book is the result of many years of struggle to confront religion as it has developed in the mainly Catholic traditions of our society with the diagnostic, interpretative, and critical comments of dynamic psychology—particularly from the Jungian stream. No less is it an attempt to inform analysts of his reactions, as a priest, to analytical psychology—under four types of heading.
First, he seeks to confront analyst with what he calls their “predicament” (p. 52), by which he means his opinion that many people, who become their patients, suffer from a need for a metaphysical and ethical orientation, i.e. from a “metaphysical hunger” (p. 41), which analysts, in his opinion, should be in a position to meet.
Fr. White then accuses analysts of pretending to a Weltanschauliche Neuträlitat (p. 40), when really all the time they are subtly indoctrinating their patients both inside the consulting room by their interpretations and outside it by their published works. By doing this, however, Fr. Victor White neglects amongst other things the fact that analysis involves in the end the uncovering of spontaneous processes leading towards a differentiation of the patient from the analyst, i.e. the opposite of indoctrination.
Somehow Fr. White has forgotten the kind of training an analytical psychologist receives. An analyst, who works in terms of the emergence of the self, i.e. the spontaneous functioning of the total personality in its relationship to the inner and outer world, including other persons, groups, and the social, cultural, and religious institutions, is trained to become aware of any unconscious dissociated fragments that may function in himself as “theologies” and “ethical absolutes”.
With regard to Fr. White's contention that patients want metaphysical and ethical absolutes, the onus of proof that they do rests upon him. Analysts tend not to find this to be the case with patients, and indeed the expression of such a want represents material for a