‘Two Scrubby Travellers’: A Psychoanalytic View of Flourishing and Constraint in Religion through the Lives of John and Charles Wesley. By Pauline Watson

Abstract

Students of the early history of the Methodist movement and of the lives of John Wesley (1703–91) and his younger brother Charles (1707–88) are not unfamiliar with the use of psychological categories and typologies to interpret Methodist experience or to account for the Wesleys’ lives and impact. E. P. Thompson’s description of Methodist worship as ‘a ritualized form of psychic masturbation’ is only the most notorious example of this approach. In striking contrast to these sensational pronouncements, the present study brings together a profound understanding of psychoanalytic theory, long professional experience of psychotherapy, and a close reading of the extant works of the Wesley brothers to offer a rich and insightful interpretation of their lives, personalities, and religious experience. As well as adding to the resources available to historians of early Methodism, Dr Watson is also able to reflect on the role of religion in facilitating or impeding change and growth, in dialogue with Martyn Percy’s work on fundamentalism and revivalism.