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In this book, Neville Symington attempts to integrate the best aspects of psychoanalysis and religion, arguing that psychoanalysis needs the “core values” found in “mature religions,” just as religion needs the emotional expertise found in psychoanalysis. More precisely, he believes that “Psychoanalysis challenges religion to change its theology and practice, and religion in turn challenges the positivist scientific model that underlines much of Freud's psychoanalytic formulations” (pp. 91-92).
Symington critiques religion and revelation even as he postulates a “natural theology” based on reason. As a bricoleur of some old-fashioned notions about the “subject” (or self), Symington tells us how consciousness, intentionality, and selfhood converge in a religious sensibility originally derived from a “burial complex”: a once-upon-a-time (the “Axial Era”) when humans first began to bury their tribal relations. In this way, Symington suggests that we have evolved from a “primitive” to a “mature” religious stance, one in which mere “instinct” and survival has given way to the possibility of responsible “ego-action,” intention, and conscience. Like many before him, Symington places choice and agency near the center of the moral universe. As a consequence he envisages a developmental gain whereby we can choose for ourselves, indeed, to choose our self and be a self: namely, a worthy, “responsibly free,” reasonable, moral agent of and in the world.
Highly problematic, though, is Symington's uncritical importation of evolutionary discourse onto the field of psychical development. While this is clearly not a new approach, we should recall that Darwin himself hardly advocated a walk down this garden path. For Darwin never produced a normative social or psychical evolutionary doctrine. As Symington recognizes, Darwin rather thought adaptation to the environment and reproductive viability