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Tillich and Jung, though acquainted with each other's work, never met or corresponded, and this non-meeting has left us the tantalizing possibility of what might have emerged in the thought of each had they been in dialogue. Jung wrote in 1956: ‘I have always wished to make the acquaintance of Professor Tillich, but I have never found an opportunity’ (Adler 1976, p. 323), and Tillich read an important brief essay at the Memorial Meeting of the New York Analytical Psychology Club, convened in 1961, to mark Jung's death. They were near-contemporaries with shared roots in the German protestant tradition, and in many ways, Tillich might have been a more compatible and more deeply challenging sparring-partner than Fr. Victor White for Jung's development of his ideas about psychology and Christian religion.
John Dourley is both a Tillich scholar and an analytical psychologist whose work will be familiar to readers of this Journal and who has already published extensively on the comparative thought of Tillich and Jung. This book consists of eleven papers, most of which have already been published in theological journals and compilations to which few Jungian analysts will have had ready access, topped and tailed with a succinct Preface and Afterword highlighting Tillich's and Jung's common interest in providing an approach to religion which might make it possible for contemporary mankind to do justice to its religious instincts. The author, writing from his perspective as a Catholic priest and Jungian analyst, regards this as an urgent necessity at a time when ‘the greatest current threat to the species is religious conviction, faith, in religious or political form’ (p. vii). The book might bear the subtitle of ‘How to save the religious baby while throwing out the ecclesiastical bath-water’, the baby being man's essential religious nature and the bath-water being the poisonous stagnation of much contemporary institutional religion.
This work is, however, no polemic, but a se