West of England villages are typically split between an Anglican Church, patronised by landowners and farmers, and a Methodist Chapel, home to the labouring poor and the dispossessed. The origin of this divide goes back to two gifted brothers, John and Charles Wesley, whose lives spanned the 18th Century. At Oxford University they were members of the ‘holy club’ ruled by asceticism and fasting. They were dubbed by their otiose fellow students as ‘Methodicals’ because of their regular habits of early rising and preaching to the poor. The dissenting spirit of this Christian socialist influence lives on through evangelicalism – John would preach in the open-air to thousands of followers; through Charles' well-known poems and hymns (Hark the Herald Angels Sing; Loves Divine All Loves Excelling); by welcoming women clergy; and through the emphasis on faith and hope as the foundation of a Christian life, as opposed to election or adherence to doctrine.

Pauline Watson deploys her medical psychotherapist and Methodist experience to psychoanalysing the two brothers' lives based on the ideas of Bulgarian–French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. Kristeva contrasts semiotic with merely symbolic representations, the former embodying meaning, without which verbal symbolism remains abstract and devoid of feeling. Watson argues that John, for all his public talents and compassion, was somewhat emotionally dead or ‘constrained’, as attested by his failure to form satisfactory relationships with women – ever oscillating between intrusiveness and withdrawal. She links this with 18th century infant mortality: his mother Susannah had just lost four children and was in a state of mourning prior to his birth. Younger brother Charles, while inheriting his father's manic-depressive tendencies, had a more loving childhood, formed an enduring and happy marriage and was able to ‘flourish’ by bringing the semiotic and the symbolic together, transmuting painful (‘sinful’) emotional experience into words and music.

Watson deploys two further key Kristevian concepts: that of the ‘abject’ and the ‘good father’. In order to transcend ‘abject relations’ the child must survive the absence, abandonment, emptiness and deathliness which separation from the care-giver entails. This is achieved with the help of a loving and forgiving (as opposed to Freud's punitive super-ego) ‘good father’. Watson claims that John, unlike Charles, never fully attained these in an earthly sense, and so had to repress his inner void and project them into the religious dimensions of sin and God-the-fatherly love.

The book has much to recommend it: by choosing psychobiography it avoids the problem of patient confidentiality; its well-written; and it has an attractive cross-disciplinary flair. As an editor manqué I would want a snappier title; an affordable paperback edition; to eliminate the occasional lapse into thesis-speak; and to launch a series on psychoanalysis and religion of which this could be lead volume.