Spirituality and Religion: Psychoanalytic Perspectives. Edited by Jerome A. Winer and James William Anderson. Catskill, New York:  Mental Health Resources, 2007,  300 pp.

Conversations about psychological healing practices and religious belief are as ancient as shamanic rituals and performance interventions that addressed long-go individual illness and communal transgressions within particular cultural idioms. In this well-researched and rich collection of contemporary reflections, Jerome A. Winer and James William Anderson have gathered together some of today's most distinguished scholars, psychoanalytic theorists, and seasoned therapists today to reassess particular resonances between psychoanalysis, spirituality, and religion—conversations that examine and ponder spiritual aspects within clinical work. The result is an important addition to the growing library of studies that explore the overlapping areas of psychology and spirituality.

It is always a challenge to edit a book that brings together a wide array of voices and viewpoints into a readable volume. More often than not, collections of essays may spiral far afield from a loosely conceived theme, or turn so tightly around a confined thesis that the experience of reading becomes more formulaic than one of discovery. Winer and Anderson have managed to find a creative presentation that takes into account a broad approach to psychoanalysis and spiritual perspectives—exploring topics that draw from the philosophy of religion, art, and the humanities—as well as imaginative, original themes drawn from Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam as they relate to psychoanalytic wisdom. In fact, Winer and Anderson state clearly that the purpose for using both religion and spirituality in the title is that religion has been the usual term of psychoanalysts in the past, and that it “refers to systems of thought and belief that include a major role for God or for gods… usually the term applies to a formal, organized religion” (p. 2). However, the authors point out that many people today prefer the term spirituality: “We see it as referring to any felt sense of a greater, suprahu