A Pinch of Saltpetre 1988

A Psychotherapist's Personal Exegesis of the Christian Gospels: Fundamentalism revisited.

In the anxiety aroused by Islamic fundamentalism the rise of Christian fundamentalism is being overlooked; both arise from the same fundamental causes and could together be very destructive of the "humanity" that Homo sapiens has achieved.  Both espouse a blinkered exegesis of the holy texts focused and fuelled by powerful neuroses. I have said a great deal relevant to this -- the pathological schizoid condition, the evolutionary origins, the present-day varied manifestations -- elsewhere on the site in my various Headlines, Updates, and above all in my book Created in the Image (for specific reference to religion see Chapter 10).  But my personal return to Christian faith coincided with a move (or a "call") into training as a psychotherapist and therefore into psychotherapy.  As a result I could recognise the fear created in me by religious difference (the threats to new-found security) for what it was and resist a personal slide into neurotic fundamentalism. But psychotherapy, though it healed me of much anger, did not remove the anger I felt at the limited and distorted gospel exegesis that I was subjected to in the church and in my reading.  That anger I shared with fundamentalism and feminism and I found the cure in doing what Jesus advised his disciples to do: work it out for myself.  I used a personal fundamentalism, taking the words of the Gospels as literally true and basing my own exegesis on my experience and knowledge as a psychotherapist and a manager and a participant in middle-class Western culture.  Jesus told his disciples to have salt in themselves; taking my personal salt to flavour the Christian gospel has given me a fundamentally secure faith that would make me outcast if my own church knew of it.  The fundamentalism of a psychotherapist and middle manager may not be your fundamentalism but it might give you ideas about how to shake your own salt over the Christian gospel.

The Saltpetre heading is the space where the other book, the one I started to write in 1988, is taking whatever form time allows.  It will not be what I intended then because I was not then the qualified psychotherapist I am now, and times also have changed.  The original exegesis I worked out was to find some of the riches of the Christian Gospels referred to but never actually revealed by Christianities' official proponents.
The schizoid condition as elucidated by object relations theory, and the understandings of the human psyche provided through the practice of psychotherapy, is as fundamental to what appears on this site as to all the rest.
(For some reason the original designer of the site arranged for each new addition under this heading to come in at the bottom of the menu, unlike under Updates or Headlines!)