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Palmer states in his Foreword that he aims to reach some understanding of two important and remarkable theories of religion. He writes from a theological and philosophical background (the book has been developed from a series of lectures in a university department of theology) offering a lucid exegesis of first Freud's and then Jung's writings on religion, placing each to some extent within the context of the history of ideas, and adding his own critical appraisal.
Clinicians approaching Freud and Jung could use the book as an abstract of their ideas about the relationship between the phenomena of religious experience and their models of the psyche. Palmer writes in an even-handed way, setting out Freud and Jung in their own terms, often in their own words, before assessing the strengths and weaknesses of their ideas. Referencing and bibliography are exemplary. It is refreshing to find a commentator from outside the partisan world of analysis expressing real shock at the tone of some of the psychoanalytic attack on Jung (he describes Edward Glover's Freud or Jung as ‘vituperative … unparalleled in the whole history of anti-Jung literature’, p. 167)
Palmer shows how in Totem and Taboo and The Future of an Illusion Freud musters evidence from anthropology, history, genetics and psychology to support his hypothesis that belief in God is a form of neurosis related to a failure to negotiate the Oedipal relationship. He assesses the extent to which Freud's evidence has been discredited by subsequent work in each field. By ‘discredited’, he means that the causal connections, which Freud thought he had established to show how religion originated, can no longer be sustained. It would be perfectly possible to continue to value Freud's work as descriptive rather than causal (even though Freud would almost certainly not have accepted description as having equal validity to causality). Palmer, however, adds as a coup de grâce a discussion contrasting Winnicott's use of the concept