Faith, Theology, And Psychoanalysis [Hardcover]

Description: Harry S. Guntrip was best known for his affiliation with two famous psychoanalysts from what is known as the British Independent tradition of psychoanalysis in England: Ronald Fairbairn and Donald Winnicott. This book traces the various influences on the development of his clinical and theological thinking in context of the historical tension between religion and psychoanalysis. The central feature of his development will be demonstrated as a series of polarities, both theoretical and personal, conflicts with which he wrestled theologically, psychologically, and interpersonally on the professional level and in his own personal psychoanalyses. A critical evaluation of the outcome of Guntrip's own personal psychoanalyses with Fairbairn and Winnicott will demonstrate the autobiographical nature of his theoretical analysis of schizoid phenomena: a psychological state of self-preoccupation and way of being in the world. --from the Introduction Endorsements: Theological existence, wrote Karl Barth, is the personal existence of the 'little theologian' which, he went on to say, is to participate totally in the problematic aspects of the self in community with others. In this exquisite excursion into the formative religious and psychological influences on the life and practice of Harry Guntrip, Trevor Dobbs probes the self's regressive dependence upon the other as an implicit theological existence for which God is the only reality sufficient to sustain the self in its paradoxical quest for relation and autonomy. In reading this, I was reminded that all theology is autobiographical (and therefore psychological) if it is to be an authentic conversation that includes God, self and others. This is a book that will stimulate and extend that conversation. --Ray S. Anderson Fuller Theological Seminary In the century-long dialogue between psychoanalysis and religion, analysts have been accustomed to reflecting on the role of psychoanalytic elements lÃ"