This is a meticulously researched study of the interplay between religion and psychotherapy in Scotland from the interwar period up until the New Age. Addressing internationally famous practitioners such as R. D. Laing and W. R. D. Fairbairn, as well as more obscure ones, and different types of organisations, this book shows how rich and multifarious this interaction has been. Miller discusses the complexities of both psychotherapy and religion, and refers to the mixture of Freudian, Jungian and Adlerian psychotherapy with different aspects of religious traditions such as Christian mysticism, personalism and existentialism (pp. 3, 145, 146).

Miller sets out to write a symmetrical historiography, offering ‘psycho-social causes for both “right” and “wrong” beliefs, rather than explaining the former's social currency by their truthfulness, and the latter's by extraneous historical factors’ (pp. 6–7). For him, a history of Scottish psychotherapy cannot be written without reference to broader cultural and societal developments and ideas. He states that

Each chapter is carefully set against the backdrop of these developments. The focus is on Scotland, but Miller also has an eye for transnational aspects: he points at the influence of Scottish schools and practitioners abroad (like at London's Tavistock Clinic and in New Zealand) and reflects on the import of ideas and the Scottish reception thereof.

In chapter i (‘The self in communion’) Miller focuses on the interwar period and studies the Scottish reception, or rather rejection, of some Freudian ideas (his hedonistic model and solipsistic model of personality) and addresses the merging of psychoanalytic ideas with notions from the late Victorian period ‘in which evolution brought forth Christian virtues of altruism’ (p. 18), rather than ‘competitive individualism’ (p. 55). By showing how Fairbairn diligently annotated his copy of the works of the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes, who was one of the proponents of this idea of ethical progression, Miller beautifully moves from discussing this Christianised evolutionary theory to the interpersonal theory of psychoanalysis that developed in this vein. By including reflections on Ian Suttie, John Macmurray and Hugh Crichton-Miller, Miller shows how Fairbairn and his colleagues thought of the self as ‘born into relation’ and believed psychopathology to arise from disturbed personal relationships. For them, religion (as a repository of ‘supernaturally conceived know-how’ and a set of practices) needed to be rationally developed in psychotherapy (pp. 31, 34). In chapter ii (‘Interpreting God's psychotherapeutic will’) Miller studies the Edinburgh-based Davidson Clinic for Medical Psychotherapy, a charitable organisation outside the NHS, showing that traditional discursive Christianity did not simply disappear in secularising post-war Britain. Christian psychotherapy adopted, and psychologically reinterpreted, life-narrative patterns of discursive Christianity – such as conversion, rebirth, providence and miracles of healing. Reflecting on the specificity of this case, Miller suggests that the clinic's discourses and practices were ‘no doubt on par with Christian psychologies and psychotherapies elsewhere in Britain’ (p. 91). In chapter iii (‘Scottish psychotherapy in the New Age’) Miller explores how this Scottish Christian psychotherapy developed into a psychotherapeutic New Age spirituality (p. 95) that adopted ideas and practices from world religions and new religious movements (p. 129). Exploring diverse trends and currents in this era of self-spirituality, Miller discusses, amongst others, R. D. Laing's therapeutic use of LSD as a spiritual technology for mystical experience and Winifred Rushforth's (and more broadly, the Davidson Clinic's) psychotherapeutic spirituality describing self-transformation in terms of contemporary spirituality (aiming, for example, at spiritual enlightenment) and her use of symbolic objects and ritual practices. Miller then moves to the 1980s, a period early in the professionalisation of counselling, and discusses the dialogues of the medically trained counsellor Hans Schauder and the Roman Catholic monk Marcus Lefébure. These published dialogues aimed at articulating ‘a spiritual foundation’ for counselling and combined ‘Christian religious philosophy as well as theories of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and counselling’ (p. 114). While the book is already very rich, Miller still sees lacunae. In his conclusion, he reflects on what he could not do in this book (for example, study the influence abroad, impart the voices of the patients, etc.) and positions his study within the field of research on the relationship between psychology and religion, with a focus on dialogue and integration. As his nuanced chapters show, the history Miller has reconstructed in his book was one ‘in which boundaries are repeatedly drawn, erased and redrawn, and relationships reconfigured across nominally religious domains of ritual, myth, doctrine, ethics, organisation and subjective experience, and across nominally psychotherapeutic domains of nosology, diagnosis, aetiology, and therapeutics’ (p. 144).

The chronological and thematic structure of the book works well. History is brought to life in this text through the interweaving of small anecdotes, such as Sean Connery's alleged experiments and Prince Charles's interest, and fragments of source texts. For the generalist reader, the many names might be somewhat confusing but there is a helpful index at the end of the book. The short summaries at the beginning and end of each chapter provide the reader with an overview of this very rich and complex history of psychotherapy and religion.