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The Shining Stranger Preston Harold 7 May 2026

I first came across this book almost 40 years ago!! And somehow it has stuck in my memory ever since.

Underlying every postulation is the outline of a new psychology, a psychology that is both existential and religious, a psychology that pays more than lip service to the idea of the Christ in man, giving this idea an immediacy, a universality, a practicality that goes far beyond the transcendentalized and vicarious acceptance generally accorded these words in Christian circles. The dynamics of this new psychology are detailed as the author poses Jesus’ poetic words against an explanation of modern physics as given for the layman by Arthur Eddington and others such as Wolfgang Pauli and Erwin Schrédinger, and against the words of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, Alfred Adler, and other authorities in the field of psychology. Harold draws a parallel between the psychic operation of man and the operation of the secondary laws of physics, so that there is a three-party “wedding” of science, psychology, and religion. Undoubtedly, scientists, psychologists, and the clergy will view this as an uneasy alliance if not as an “impossible marriage.”

(page xii or page 18)

“The parallelism between nuclear physics and the psychology of the collective unconscious was often a subject of discussion between Jung and Wolfgang Pauli, the Nobel prizewinner in physics.

(still at page 20 8/5/26 1308)