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Gavin Miller's Miracles of Healing: Psychotherapy and Religion in Twentieth-century Scotland serves as a noteworthy example of the recent scholarly interest in the regional histories of psychotherapeutic traditions. The discussions offered by Miller in this monograph speak to important conversations in the medical humanities about the interactions of health care with spirituality; here Miller explores in considerable detail the deployment of Christian theology and New Age spirituality by psychotherapeutic thinkers in the modern Scottish context. The book tracks the efforts of internationally recognized Scottish psychotherapists like R.D. Laing and W.R.D. Fairbairn, as well as lesser known figures like Winifred Rushforth, to incorporate and at times altogether reconceive the methods and goals of psychotherapy in line with Christian (and post-Christian) notions of communion, rebirth, holiness and mystical experience.
In the first chapter, Miller sets out his contention that the links between Scottish psychotherapy and religion should be understood ‘as a nexus’ of psychotherapeutic practices that ‘emerged from cross-fertilisation with ideas and practices from Freudian, Jungian and Adlerian psychotherapy, as well as from religious traditions such as existentialism, personalism, Christian mysticism and contemporary vitalism’ (p. 3). Whilst Miller highlights the value of regional and national differences in telling the histories of psychotherapy, he is also keen to underline his commitment to a ‘wider transnational approach to history’ that attends to external cultural influences upon, and emerging from, the Scottish context (p. 4). In an important, if dense, discussion, Miller draws on David Bloor's ‘symmetry principle’, which stipulates that ‘social-scientific investigation of scientific knowledge should be “symmetrical in its style of explanation” so that “the same types of cause” are used to “explain […] true and false beliefs”’ (p. 6; cf. Bloor, 1991, p. 7). This, Mil