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Despite the questioning title and the avowedly tentative nature of his enquiries, there is a clear principle guiding the author's thoughts. He believes that there is such a thing as natural religion based on reason, and the book builds towards the claim that psychoanalysis is a natural religion and the only possible religion for our time. Symington thinks he can succeed, where Freud failed, in providing a moral basis for psychoanalysis as a spiritual experience which is meaningful in the modern era. He acknowledges a debt to Erich Fromm's book, Psychoanalysis and Religion, which provided his basic framework. It is possible to regard this book as an updating of Fromm's ideas in the light of developments in psychoanalysis since 1950.
Symington reviews the history of religious and moral thought on an evolutionary basis, describing two great leaps forward from the primitive irrational world of animism and idolatry which is attributed to early Man. The first great leap forward is the emergence of the practice of burial of the dead, which is called the burial climax. The ceremonial of burial represents an awareness of the value of the individual