PERSONALITY AND RELIGION

This is an important book of major significance by one who is well-equipped to write with insight and authority in the field of psychology and religion. Dr. Paul Johnson is professor of the psychology of religion at the Boston University School of Theology and has already written in these allied fields Psychology of Pastoral Care, Christian Love, and Psychology of Religion. This book is a thorough investigation of the nature of personality and its relationship to what is central in religious experience. He studies the four stages of life, each from the standpoint of a different psychologist; 1) infancy,- Freud, 2) childhood,- Lewin, 3) youth,- Harry S. Sullivan, 4) maturity,- Gordon Allport. Dr. Johnson seeks to unify these partial theories, and arrives at a dimensional view of personality which he calls ""dynamic interpersonalism"". In illustrating, he uses biographical case studies. Such a mature person, he assures us, can find the ultimate solution of the problems of living through the religious consciousness by which he faces the supreme fact of the eternal creative person of God as the Source of his divine life and the Creator of a divine community in which his children can live serene and redemptive lives. The book will be of great interest to ministers who wish thoughtfully to consider the concepts that lie behind a religiously oriented psychotherapy, and to psychologists and analysts who find that religion cannot be side-stepped in the treatment of their patients.