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Stephen Parker is a professor of theology and counseling who has previously written articles on personality theory and religious and spiritual development. A previous book, Led by the Spirit: Toward a Practical Theology of Pentecostal Discernment, explored the psychology and theology of claims of divine guidance. In this book, he explores how Donald Winnicott's religious upbringing affected the development of his contributions to psychoanalytic thinking.
For most of us who are unfamiliar with the details of Protestant Christian theology, that Winnicott was raised in an English Wesleyan Methodist church-going family rather than in the Anglican Church of England might seem insignificant. However, for Parker, as a Protestant theologian, the differences between the two churches are important, and he attributes much of Winnicott's psychoanalytic thinking to the influence of Wesleyan theology and religious practice. He points out that Wesleyan Methodism emphasized the Christian's freedom to think for oneself and to tolerate differences in regard to religion, a regard that Parker points out repeatedly, which Winnicott absorbed throughout his childhood and adolescent education. For Methodists the personal relationship between a believer and God is expressed in prayer, scripture reading, and personal experience as well as socially in Bible study groups and communal worship. Methodism was not authoritative; clergy and laity together governed church organizations. Parker also notes that John Wesley had been described as a “practical” theologian, who worked out theological issues in plain language for “plain people” (p. 76). The point of Parker's work here is that Winnicott's approach to