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Symington is a perplexing writer. He writes about vital concerns, has good, perceptive things to say, and always illustrates them with accurate, telling case-vignettes; yet often he is diffuse and repetitive; he casually gives words new meanings without careful definitions; and he is unfair and dismissive about other writers.
Here, he is proposing that traditional religion is not relevant to man in the modern world. Psychoanalysis is relevant to man, because it is concerned with emotional action between people living intimately together; but it does not answer questions about purpose, meaning and fulfilment for men and women; hence, religion and psychoanalysis need each other. Many would agree that traditional religion has lost its meaning, and it is a cliché to see psychotherapists as the priest of the new psychoanalytic religion. The hard part is to define the relationship between the two and pinpoint the overlap between them that we sense but do not grasp.
In outline, Symington offers definitions of primitive, mature and natural religions, spirituality and morality, and then reviews Freud's Jung's and other analysts’ approach to religion. He defines narcissism as the most convincing account of human greed, and its transformation as the goal of psychoanalysis, in common with that of all mature religions, he ends by arguing that psychoanalysis's goal of self-knowledge is inseparable from emotional acts of virtue; so it is a spirituality-in-the-world. It undoubtedly is an ambitious attempt to link psychoanalysis and spirituality.
We need not devote much space to his outline of religion, spirituality and morality, as he would be the first to admit that others have written more comprehensively and authoritatively on the subject.
In his review of analytic writing on religion and spirituality, Symington concentrates on Jung's link between individuation and spirituality. Storr (1973) admits ‘It is easy to lose patience with Jung’, and when Symington says ‘There are so many c