I cannot put it more clearly than Robert Stolorow, who said at the end of the interview ‘Your questions were very thoughtful and incisive.’ It is clear that Professor Kenny had a plan that she brought to each interview. The four interviews that follow are themselves outstanding exemplars of psychoanalytic enquiry. Inevitably some detail is missing but the core ideas are so clearly enunciated that these chapters alone will prove to be invaluable to any person seeking to navigate this complex and jargon-infested territory. This is an heroic task to accomplish in two chapters but she achieves it with remarkable fluency. After the interviews, she lets them loose on a therapy transcript, which acts as a kind of Rorschach inkblot onto which they project their fantasies about the patient and the therapist.īefore we meet the four clinicians, Professor Kenny sets the scene with an unusually lucid exposition of the core ideas of Freud and post-Freudian psychoanalysis. While no four people can be said to be representative of an entire community of practitioners they are each distinctive and different with respect to their theoretical framework and the cultural milieu within which they operate. To do this, she engages us in an intensive dialogue with four eminent practitioners. In this book Dianna Kenny sets out to discover what remains of Freud in contemporary psychoanalytic practice. Is religion a form of wish-fulfilment, a collective delusion to which we cling as we try to fathom our place and purpose in the drama of cosmology? Can there be morality without faith? Are science and religion radically incompatible? What are the roots of fundamentalism and terror theology? These are some of the questions addressed in God, Freud and Religion, a book thatwill be of interest to psychoanalysts, psychologists and psychotherapists, students ofpsychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy and theology and all those with an interestin religion and human behaviour. Science, on the other hand, offers no such explanations about the universe or the meaning of our lives and no comfort for the unanswered longings of the human race. It explains the origin of the universe, offers solace and protection from evil, and provides a blueprint about how we should live our lives, with just rewards for the righteous and due punishments for sinners and transgressors. Freud argued that religion is so compelling because it solves the problems of our existence. She argues that psychoanalytic theory provides a fertile and creative approach to the study of religion that attempts to integrate religious belief with our innate human nature and developmental histories that have unfolded in the context of our socialization and cultural experiences. Did God create man or did man create God? In this book, Dianna Kenny examines religious belief through a variety of perspectives - psychoanalytic, cognitive, neuropsychological, sociological, historical and psychiatric - to provide a coherent account of why people might believe in God.
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