Our image of God, the pursuit of perfection, and holiness are examined and reinterpreted in the light of psychology in this latest book by Anne Townsend, a doctor and former missionary in Thailand who is now a psychotherapist and an Anglican priest.

The author sees people undergoing psychoanalysis as searching for something similar to sanctification - 'a searching for the holy grail of wholeness, completion and healing'. In this book she attempts to merge the insights of psychology, particularly those of Carl Jung, with Christian beliefs to help people become 'increasingly whole, moving towards integration, becoming more and more the people we truly are'.

The examples she uses are probably painfully familiar to any who have dealings with emotionally distressed Christians, and all of us will recognise elements of our own struggles in them. We may all be reluctant to enter dark areas of our personalities and Christians are not immune from using spiritual language 'to avoid facing the reality of what they themselves are really like under the outer respectable mask they wear most of the time'.

Through psychoanalysis and psychological insights Anne Townsend sees a way to face this reality. She sees most people as suffering from emotional hurts experienced from infancy onwards, and many of us as needing deep healing of the kind she believes can be provided by the psychotherapeutic approach.

Psychotherapy or counselling from well-trained professionals, who are not necessarily Christian, is seen as complementary to Christianity, not in competition with it. It can provide understanding of emotional and psychological struggles and help with them. Anne Townsend speaks of her own crisis of faith and period of despair, and how she came to a faith rather different from her previous evangelical certainty - one in which she finds more room for doubt and uncertainty, with a view of God less influenced by the projections of internal conflicts and more in harmony with people's emotional needs.

Freud suggested getting rid of God. Anne doesn't see that as necessary but it is as if religion is but one way to find help in the journey of self-understanding, and so the uniqueness of the Christian gospel and of Jesus Christ are diminished. Jesus is considered a symbol - in Jungian thought a symbol is something rooted in the unconscious mind with power to bring order out of inner chaos. The insights of psychoanalysis seem ultimately more important than the biblical revelation and objective truth takes a back seat to the driving power of the symbols, archetypes and metaphors of psychoanalytical thinking.

However, the author gives the final word to John Calvin who advocated first beholding God's countenance and then contemplating self as the way to self-knowledge. If we can behold God as he is and face the reality of our inner selves in the light of that, we should find we are becoming more and more the people we are meant to be - truly good enough for God. This book will help some to do that, particularly if they are interested in Jungian psychology, and can give all of us valuable insights into our own views of God and of ourselves.