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I often think that a good book is one that stimulates self-reflection. Spezzano and Gargiulo's Soul on the Couch: Spirituality, Religion, and Morality in Contemporary Psychoanalysis certainly did that for me. While reading the book, I found myself reflecting on my struggles to understand spirituality and religion in my own analytic treatment. I felt that previously disconnected thoughts and experiences related to these issues began to come together slowly and in a more cohesive way as I was reading the book and preparing to write this review. Looking back, I realized that my attitudes toward my religion, religious upbringing, and spirituality had undergone numerous changes during the course of my psychoanalysis. When I began my psychoanalytic treatment I thought that a discussion of my religious beliefs and practices did not belong in my analysis. I was worried that my beliefs would be viewed as pathological and childish by my analyst. I could not appreciate then that these worries also reflected the depth of my own uncertainty and conflict about my religious beliefs. Although I did not talk much about this topic in my analysis, I was quietly observing my Jewish analyst's nonobservance of the Jewish religious holidays in the first two or three years of my analysis. In subsequent years I observed that my analyst started canceling sessions on some of the Jewish religious holidays. I wondered whether this change reflected a change in him or had more to do with his remarriage, which had occurred around this time in my analysis (his first wife having died in the second year of my analysis).
Most interesting about all of this was that, in the first phase of my analysis, I could begin to talk to him about religion only after I had actively started questioning my own religious beliefs and, in