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This book would be of interest to the religious or spiritual mental health professional, as well as one who is merely curious about religion and spirituality. The format is attractive: The fact that it is an edited book with multiple contributors allows the reader to dip into a chapter here or there and to put the book down and pick it up months later. This makes the work more accessible to the reader who is curious about some topics but not committed to reading an integrated book-length presentation. The implicit thrust of the book is to offer analysts a variety of toeholds in reaching beyond the horizon of their professional commitment to the analytic perspective toward a transcendent view of psychoanalysis.
The authors of the chapters have taken their task seriously, each in his own way (all the contributors are men). All of the chapters offer interesting contextual material and include bibliographies, some of them quite extensive. As with all edited books, there is some variation in perspective among the chapters. In this case, the variation is on two axes: religious tradition and psychoanalytic tradition; there is an unusually rich span of psychoanalytic traditions among the authors. In several chapters, there is the emphasis on Eastern perspectives that has become common in psychoanalytic treatments of religious-spiritual topics. This material is clearly deeply meaningful to the writers and might well be most meaningful to new psychoanalyst seekers without a personal religious tradition.
Each reader would bring personal preferences to the selection of chapters. The inclusion of a chapter on psychoanalysis and Jewish spirituality,