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There is a widespread belief that psychoanalysts see religion as inherently pathological, but Trevor Dobbs, a Californian psychoanalyst, in this complex and ambitious work, explores the religious roots of some of the key figures on the psychoanalytic scene in Britain in the twentieth century and, in particular, their origins in nonconformity. Freud, of course, had highly valued a warm and life-long friendship with the Swiss pastor, Oskar Pfister, and David Bakan, a Jewish rabbi and Harvard scholar had even argued that psychoanalysis could be read as a secularization of the Jewish mystical tradition. However, it is The Future of an Illusion that people usually associate with Freud, and the idea that religion represents a continuation of the infantile need for a father that we ought, as adults, to outgrow.
Born in 1901, Harry Guntrip, the subject of this biography, came from a nonconformist family and joined the Salvation Army as a teenager. He rose rapidly in its ranks and appears to have benefitted greatly from it in terms of friendship and practical skills, but he found its authoritarianism and its clumsiness in personal relationships increasingly unpalatable and left it when he was nineteen for the Congregational church. He trained as a Congregational minister in his twenties and was ultimately in charge of a large church in Leeds with a congregation of a thousand. At the age of forty-nine he felt he had to make a choice: to continue with his calling as a minister, or to give that up and devote himself to the psychotherapeutic