1st Edition
‘Two Scrubby Travellers’: A psychoanalytic view of flourishing and constraint in religion through the lives of John and Charles Wesley
Introduction. Why Kristeva? The Search for Goodness. An ‘emotionally available object’. The search for ‘deep truth’ through symbolisation. Resonances: Psychic space in a religious context. Evangelical nature: The Wesleys’ historical and religious context. John Wesley. Charles Wesley. Theological differences. Conclusion.
Biography
Pauline Watson graduated in medicine from Glasgow University, UK, and holds a PhD in theology from Durham University, UK. She worked as a General Practitioner before training in psychiatry. As a consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist, she set up a local psychiatric service in Consett, Co. Durham. She has also worked as a psychotherapist with asylum seekers.
This is a beautiful book which convincingly weaves the lives and religious development of the Wesley brothers and their mother with relevant psychoanalytic concepts. This examined life illuminates their human struggles and seeks to offer a narrative in which religious experience and the use of psychoanalytic thinking and theory can be used both to avoid internal experience but also to transcend it. The tracking of their human struggles and the travails of their souls is put in the context of psychoanalytic theory and religious understanding. It offers hope of resolution and salvation. --Jan McGregor Hepburn, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist, Registrar of the British Psychoanalytic Council
Genuinely inter-disciplinary books are much to be appreciated especially when they throw fresh light on people of major significance. Dr Pauline Watson’s very considerable achievement is to have drawn on her professional experience of understanding how human beings become what they are to illuminate the different characters of John and Charles Wesley. In her sympathetic portraits, both come alive anew for all those of us who in different ways are heirs of their many gifts and graces. --Professor Ann Loades, CBE, Professor Emerita of Divinity, University of Durham, and Honorary Professor, University of St Andrews
