Feet of Clay, a Study of Gurus

Pocketbok. Harper Collins . 1997.

Gott skick. Feet of Clay is one of Anthony Storr's most original, illuminating and highly acclaimed books. It sets some of the most notorious gurus - monsters such as Jim Jones or David Koresh - beside some of the most respected spiritual leaders in the western world - Ignatius of Loyola, Jesus himself - to show, with Storr's characteristic and humane insight, how they have more in common than meets the eye. Why do we classify some of them as legitimate thinkers or spiritual leaders and others as madmen? Storr demonstrates brilliantly how the apparently mad and the apparently sane are not different in kind but simply appear in different parts of the spectrum. of sanity.
In Feet of Clay, Anthony Storr offers us the first good guru guide.
Instead of tracking the mentality of the disciples, as many writers have done before him, Storr turns his sharp psychiatrist's light on the gurus themselves... A barminess test won't work. Instead, says Storr, we should distrust "characters who are both deeply self-absorbed and also authoritarian," because "the charisma of certainty is a snare which entraps the child who is latent in us all"
... Little of the burgeoning
literature of new religion has arrived at such simple understanding.'
Colin Hughes, Independent
'An immensely exciting book... Anthony Storr is not just a psychiatrist who can write, though no one else in his field can convey complicated ideas with such fluency and wit; he is also that rare beast, a psychiatrist who is conscious of the limited usefulness of his professional skills when confronted by something as resistant to analysis as the human psyche.'
Damian Thompson, Literary Review
'A stimulating and readable book... Storr's gurus include Gurdjieff and Rajneesh, Jung and Freud, Loyola and Jesus and an army of religious tricksters and cranks... As Storr wisely concludes all gurus should come with a health warning.
Simon Jenkins, Sunday Times